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

[Karl Trygve Kalleberg <karltk@prosalg.no>]

On Tue, Jan 08, 2002 at 11:10:39AM -0600, Damon M. Conway wrote:
>  Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> >tis 2002-01-08 klockan 16.54 skrev Damon M. Conway:
> >
> >> I think this is where eclasses could really help.  Eclasses should allow
> >> you to create a meta ebuild that looks for certain make.conf vars set and
> >> react accordingly.  danarmak and drobbins are the ones to ask for more
> >> details on eclasses.
> >
> >For now eclasses should _only_ be used in KDE. A decission still has to
> >be made about eclasses. And both me and drobbins have some objections to
> >eclasses.
> 
> Hmm, ok.  I thought they were on their way to finalization.
> 
> >For one I think that eclasses break one of ebuilds most important
> >strength. The ease of use, that they are almost identical to installing
> >a package manually.
> 
> Depends on usage.  I think eclasses could be quite powerful for
> cross-platform capabilities and system types (SuxOS, Web Server, etc), and
> they, in theory, can pick up the global configuation baton where make.conf
> leaves off.  As long as they are well-defined, I don't see how they really
> cause any problems, or make ebuilds any harder to write.

>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.

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
? 

For instance, use scsh (okay, okay, so Scheme might not be popular with
the crowd) or Python. If you take a look at SCons, you'll see Make recast
into Python, with all the benefits that gives you (stable, clean,
well-known language, lots of documentation, lots of support libraries,
cross-platform runtime).

Just stirring things up since the eclasses debate seems to be coming
regardless.


Karl T