So a while back I resigned from the portage team, ironically the team I had come on board gentoo to help. Not a big deal; I left because I had lost interest and I had other projects to work on. Except now I have some free time so I requested my svn commit bit back; and they wanted some patches and stuff to make sure I was back for real. It was a reasonable request; but then something about it struck me. I didn’t really care so much about getting stuff in. Part of my mission is to point out problems with that team. I’m not 100% sure what they are, I have only vague ideas. But there are problems; with progress, with backwards compatability, with implementing stuff in general.

Problem #1: Things never get implemented because backwards compatability is a bitch.
I realize it is, that doesn’t stop you from submitting patches, it certainly doesn’t stop you from submitting “POC” code as I have done before. This is used to point out that the problem isn’t (or shouldn’t be) code based. Set support is *trivial* I wrote a proof of concept in like 30 minutes, and I have a better patch that took about 2 hours (it still needs work). Default IUSE was rather trivial; 5 or 6 hours for a POC patch, and after that it’s a matter of integration and making it pretty. Code is note the problem.

Problem #2: Communication. It seems like stuff only gets discussed by dev-portage or gentoo-portage-dev. This is normally fine for smaller things, but at some point you need to advertise your stuff, you need to get input from others, you need HELP. The Portage Team can’t solve all these problems by itself, especially not since many are tree-based. ASK for help, we have a lot of smart developers and they may have a solution you haven’t thought of yet.

So I told the team fine, no commit bit for me, I’ll branch instead.

Welcome to Fruitage, my personal portage branch. No politics here, no “zomfg it will break the tree.” It can break mine, I could care less. I am the only one with commit access, I have ebuilds and tarballs in my devspace for it. As I impliment stuff I will attach diffs against SVN for the fixes, starting with GLEP 21. I will show that it is not a code shortage that is a problem here, because I plan to provide all the code.

Technical:
I used svk to mirror the portage-svn on my local machine, and then used svk to branch it. I can use svk pull to pull bugfixes and updates out of portage-svn and merge them with fruitage, so essentially fruitage will be portage-svn with whatever I patch in. The intent is to get code back into portage-svn (this is by no means a fork).

Anyway, enjoy
http://dev.gentoo.org/~antarus/projects/fruitage/