Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Ability to pass arguments to src_configure/src_compile

[Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@googlemail.com>]

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On Mon, 8 Sep 2008 14:33:50 -0700
Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 12:46 Sun 07 Sep     , Marcus D. Hanwell wrote:
> > I personally agree with several others who have replied to this
> > thread. The reduction in lines of code/characters seems to
> > introduce an uglier syntax which is harder to read with
> > questionable benefits.
> 
> One of the great things about ebuilds is that they're very natural to 
> write in most cases, if you can manage to build the program by hand. 
> Raising this barrier of entry for questionable benefit seems like a
> bad idea. We don't need to make it any harder to begin contributing
> to Gentoo.

So why are we making people know the exact ins and outs of
reimplementing default functions, complete with knowledge of whether or
not to use die, when all they need in most cases is to set a simple
variable instead?

What proportion of people do you think know whether or not you need a
die with econf or emake? How many user-written ebuilds out there
correctly install the right docs and don't try to install docs that
don't exist, deal with install parallelisation correctly and handle
error cases properly?

The DEFAULT_* variables make it *easier* to write packages because half
the time you don't need to arse around writing src_* functions. Every
src_* function written by someone is another place there can be a
non-obvious screwup.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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