split-gentoo?

So, drobbins blogged about something which has come up before (or am I just imaging that I have conversed with others about this topic before?).

Gentoo’s package set has grown immensely over the past years. While this is a great thing, it also can be a bad thing. One big issue that crops up when you have such a large group of packages is that the maintainence overhead grows. The result of this is that you start to loose quality. As more and more quality is lost, users will become uninterested. It is not fun when you can not even install a package because of insufficient QA.

The base tree could house the core packages, and then everything else could easily be pulled in from overlays. This way, more attention could be provided to QA, and you also get space savings! Currently, the portage tree on my laptop is 524 MB. I dont use a large portion of the tree, and I would imagine that most users dont use a large portion of the tree either.

Almost every other distribution faces this problem, and most of them came to the same solution: split up the packages. Collectively refer to the sets maintained by developers as the official packages, and then allow contributions. Gentoo could do the same: split up the tree, but still maintain an official and user-supported set of packages.

I think that splitting up the tree is the way to go, but of course I may just be a dillusional insane code monkey.

~ by compnerd on January 25, 2007.