FUD

I know it’s no longer my primary concern, but it still amazes me to see the FUD coming from a few Gentoo devs about BreakMyGentoo. After all the work Joem and I did during the last two releases to bring our ebuilds up to the “Gentoo QA Standard”, someone comes along and makes brain-dead remarks like this. I happen to have applauded when Gentopia was released, and have offered help along with bug reports but I can’t really say I can continue after these comments.

First of all, saying in the Gentopia “project quality control will be much higher” is great in theory, but so far their ebuilds have been of very marginal quality (completely wrong use_enable statements in beagle, gnome-volume-manager ebuild that doesn’t use pmount correctly making it almost useless, digests not getting commited). And yes, I have submitted a bug report or two but the issues remained when the site was last active. Don’t throw stones if you live in a glass house.

BMG did have some QA issues back in the day, but that was entirely due to the fact that it was a one-man (me!) show for a while and I was less picky about some things than I should have been. However once I got some help (and a helpful Gentoo dev or two) that all changed.

Are ebuilds on BMG “stolen from bug reports and other sources”? I can’t really speak to the source for all the ebuilds these days, but I will say I find the concept of a “stolen” ebuild a bit funny. How do you steal an ebuild? I’ve submitted patches and bug fixes on the Gentoo bugzilla and never got an official credit when they were integrated, does that qualify as “stolen”? Anyway, the only ebuild of mine in that tree is one I did from scratch for nautilus-sendto. So :-P

The initial ebuilds in the new BMG tree were taken from steev’s site (pretty much wholesale I think), but the ones for the next beta release are their own thing AFAIK. I am very grateful for the work steev did on that release (and I contributed a little as well), but do you think he wrote all of those ebuilds from scratch? Of course not. He used the latest versioned build in the tree, copied it over for the new version and changed whatever needed it (deps, patches, etc.) to make it work. Besides, once you’ve posted an ebuild on bugzilla and it’s deemed too unstable for the tree (software, not ebuild), then why not drop it in an unstable repository for those that might have use for it?

It’s funny. I pretty much got used to getting sniped at for whatever reason from some devs, but after stepping away from things it seems that much more petty and pointless. These projects should be complimentary and certainly not working at cross-purposes.

Cardoe, if you are serious about Gentopia being “not at all Gnome focused”, then concentrate on the non-gnome aspects (dbus, hal, etc.) and leave the Gnome stuff to the people that have that as their primary focus. Or at least try to find a way to work with these people that are donating their time for no other reason than because they want to.

All I have to say is I wish Lars and his crew the best of luck with BMG, I hope to be able to contribute a little (not just leech), and here’s to many hours spent figuring out wtf went wrong with an unstable upgrade… ;)