Re: [gentoo-project] Re: Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2013-04-09

[Tom Wijsman <TomWij@gentoo.org>]

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On Sat, 6 Apr 2013 20:05:11 -0600
Ryan Hill <dirtyepic@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Sun, 7 Apr 2013 00:37:22 +0200
> "Andreas K. Huettel" <dilfridge@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> Every time this comes up we explain why.  Please refer to those
> threads for the complete story.

Which threads?

> In short:
> Toolchain packages, for better or worse, are built by eclass.  We are
> not forward-porting toolchain.eclass every time someone decides there
> are too many EAPIs in the tree.

Did you ever try it?

> Every change to that eclass breaks something (the trick is to break
> things people don't care about any more and hope no one notices).

That's exactly what legacy code does if nobody maintains it. The trick
is to make an end to that soon; because the longer you keep this
around, the more you will break in the future. Are you going to wait
for the moment that changes are really required but can't be applied?

> I don't know the ins and outs of glibc's eblits but I doubt they would
> be simple to port either.  I also don't know much about
> toolchain-binutils.eclass, but it seems like it would be doable.

Someone would know; if not, we'll have to do some re-engineering.

> Other packages are already on later EAPIs.

Cool.

> There is no reason to remove EAPI 0.  Leave it as the baseline that
> other EAPI's are defined by.  Most devs will not be dealing with
> these packages, so it really doesn't affect them.  Since there is no
> reason to remove it, we will continue to use it.

Of course there is a reason, getting rid of unmaintainable legacy code.
That shouldn't be representative as a baseline for current code. Sadly,
I see such ebuilds on more than a weekly basis, you can't really avoid
it give that 25% of the repository consists of it. If you can't refactor
it in place, you may opt to rewrite it in an overlay; in EAPI 5 or 6.

-- 
With kind regards,

Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
Gentoo Developer

E-mail address  : TomWij@gentoo.org
GPG Public Key  : 6D34E57D
GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2  ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D

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