Re: [gentoo-dev] Secure Gentoo - What do you think?

[Dan Armak <danarmak@gentoo.org>]

On Thursday 10 January 2002 13:24, you wrote:
> From what I have understood, eclasses is primarily about bringing a few of
> the OOP principles to bash scripts. As a computer-linguist, I find this
> attempt misguided at best, but as a system administrator/bash script
> hacker, I find the idea appealing.
Well, it's priamrily about bringing one principle to bash, and that is code 
reuse (which isn't even strictly OOP). Things like variable scope/visibility 
(which doesn't really exist in bash) tend to poke spikes into the wheels. 

>
> Since eclasses are associated with a learning curve, would it not be
> preferrable to recast the whole inheritance thing in a proper
> object-oriented language and rather build a support framework for it there
> ?
Well, the big idea behind ebuilds in general is to make them as similar to 
compiling a package by hand (i.e. from a bash shell) as possible. Of course, 
eclasses are already sufficiently unlike that, but moving to python would 
still make things worse. For one thing, not everyone knows python as well as 
they do bash (me included).

I think that right now I should update/cleanup the eclass howto. I'll make a 
short, readable document. So, to work :-)


-- 
Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux, Desktop Team
Matan, Israel