[proaudio] ProAudio current state

[Jouni Rinne <jouni.rinne@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings all the proaudio developers!

The following is meant as a constructive criticism about the current state of 
the proaudio overlay. I really am not trying to offend anyone, and if I 
inadvertently manage to do so, I apologize sincerely.

Frankly, the proaudio overlay is a horrible mess, and unfortunately has been 
like that for a long time. I haven't been able to use it as such, as an overlay, 
for over an year. Frustratingly, I've been forced to just checkout the svn 
occasionally and copy the interesting pieces to my own overlay. There are two 
main reasons for that:
-- there are lots of duplicate ebuilds for no apparent reason in proaudio tree 
(by 'duplicates' I mean 'same versions as in official portage')
-- conflicts with some ebuilds I've made myself.

I'm reluctant to say this, but it seems to me that the proaudio developers like 
to live in their small world and doesn't pay attention to what's happening in 
the main gentoo/portage world. The proaudio overlay should be integrated with 
Gentoo much tighter.

Let's take flowcanvas (which Arve Barsnes just pointed out, very good) as an 
example (yes I know, you fixed it already...):

According to the changelogs flowcanvas was originally introduced in the main 
portage tree in 29th May 2008 (as x11-libs/flowcanvas, which category describes 
its function much better than media-libs), and the 0.5.0 version in 9th July 
2008. 0.5.0 version was added in proaudio in 12 July, as 
media-libs/flowcanvas... How was this even possible? Didn't any of the devs 
check anything before committing the ebuild? A simple 'eix -s flowcanvas' would 
have shown something was wrong.

How often do you (proaudio developers) sync your systems? Once a year?

This is just an example, there are others like that, totally unnecessary, 
wasted, duplicated efforts.

Of course, there are occasionally perfectly legitimate excuses for duplicate 
ebuilds, like providing vst or similar libraries & features support for programs 
which doesn't have such support in the main tree. But even these produce 
problems, most of the time an overlay user isn't able to choose between proaudio 
and official ebuild.

Well, to summarize, there are two things which should be done to proaudio 
overlay ASAP, to make it usable:
1) Clean out *all* outdated & unnecessary duplicate ebuilds.
2) In case of the necessary duplicate ebuilds, fix the package version & 
revision numbers so people could choose whether to use the official gentoo 
version or the proaudio version.

Yours
Jouni Rinne

--
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| Jouni 'Mad Max' Rinne      ('x') | - Sledge Hammer                    |
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