Overlay Gentoo fork

My_World · Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 10:54 am Post subject: Overlay Gentoo fork

Is there a project that is basically a Gentoo fork using only the overlays?

It seems that even the ~ arch of Gentoo has become grossly outdated and lost the appeal for people looking for bleeding edge, so I'm just asking, not attacking or implying anything, is there a project somewhere out there that uses the more bleeding edge overlays?

The only thing you would actually need is the baselayout of Gentoo and then one could basically ditch portage for overlays, the only concern I have is that there is no broad overhead supervision, if I express myself correctly.
The only thing needed for the overlays is a governing/advisory department making sure most overlays are current and maybe even allocating manpower where needed. They do not need to do the job, but say overlay "foobar" hasn't been updated in some time, just dropping the maintainer a note and asking to make the needed updates? Or even serve as an upstream collector of bugs related specifically to the overlays?

Is there such a project? Mixing and matching overlays and portage, sooner or later you are going to run into a brick wall...
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"Ubuntu" - an African word meaning "Gentoo is too hard for me".

AllenJB · Veteran Joined: 02 Sep 2005 Posts: 1285

What packages do you consider to be grossly outdated?

Why would you want to start from scratch? Why not simply provide "normal" overlays that build on the base Gentoo already provides?

It sounds like you're advocating a system which is going to require large amounts of volunteer manpower to fix a system which falls behind because it doesn't have enough manpower. Why not just join Gentoo and help there?

I've personally used quite a few overlays in my time - mixing and matching to get the packages I want at any given point. I've never run into any "brick walls" that I can remember. What sort of problems do you foresee here?

Related post: Discussion on user contributions to Gentoo: issues/proposals

i92guboj · Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 12:20 pm Post subject: Re: Overlay Gentoo fork

My_World · Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 5:59 pm Post subject:

Thank you for the replies, and like I said, I do not want to debate the whole issue again.

Maybe my wording was wrong in using "fork", what I would have loved is for a distro Gentoo like, but more up to date, and the only way I can see it happening in Gentoo is if one switched over to only the overlays.

I understand that there are still stuff in portage that is needed, but it is becoming more minor as the time goes by and more overlays are created. This is not just KDE4 like stated, but there is overlays for everything except the base layout it seems.

I there is not such project, then fine, not need to debate the ups and downs of Gentoo.

_________________
"Ubuntu" - an African word meaning "Gentoo is too hard for me".

i92guboj · Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 6:13 pm Post subject:

It's just crossed my brain that Sabayon might have different packages for the basic stuff (I don't know for sure, it's just a guess). So, either using Sabayon instead of Gentoo as a base, or using the Sabayon overlay might be what you are after (as I said, not sure, and I don't know either if you already considered this). However, as per the recurrent polemic: Sabayon != Gentoo, so don't expect much support from the Gentoo developers if you use that.

SeaTiger · Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 5:41 am Post subject:

I tried Sabayon once a few months ago. The installation is perfect, very graphical. However the mess come after the installation, I did a emerge --sync followed by a emerge -avuDN world, tones of circular dependency that needed to be resolved. Well, that is where I stop ...