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jnrowe-misc - The unsorted package overlay¶
A collection of
ebuildfiles with no overall theme.
TLDR; For what it was jnrowe-misc served its purpose well.
An island unto itself¶
While it may come as a surprise to a few of the users(which would be most of them) the overlay available on GitHub wasn’t the deliverable at any point in time. In fact, the often convoluted merge history in the repository probably hinted at that quite a bit.
jnrowe-misc was always the combination of a few independently managed
repositories that I bundled up to make available for public consumption.
Eventually it ended up being mostly Python stuff, but that was because the
support burden of other packages was becoming more time consuming than I could
justify.
The real audience for the overlay, my co-workers, saw a different beast entirely. It used our keyword types and rules, it came bundled with the tests I was unable to share and had a tighter schedule for maintenance.
Still, I received a fair number of emails and live comments from users so I’ll call that a success!
Upstreamed¶
Sadly, very little was ever taken upstream(even less if you count the parts that were credited). This was entirely my fault. I originally started exporting the overlay because I was fed up with the new package process upstream, and it seemed like the best way to deal with that for me.
I had hoped that some packages would be picked up, but didn’t actively push them after the first few.
The overlay should have never touched packages that were available upstream, but
occasionally they overlapped when upstream added them. The use of ::shadow
to workaround problems when new packages were added upstream worked really
well, and saved the few remaining hairs on my balding head.
Legacy¶
It looks like the majority of packages will continue to be maintained for the foreseeable future, but regrettably it looks like the result will not be available beyond a “open to all people who know where to look” organisation on GitHub.
I’d like to change the new maintainer’s mind, but in all honesty I understand their reasons. I’ve stopped maintaining a lot of once public projects over the past couple of years, and it is as refreshing as it is saddening.
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