On Wed, 08 Jun 2011 17:43:38 +0200 Hans de Graaff wrote: > That leaves the question what to do with the approach for EAPI=2,3. > I'd rather not risk breaking ebuilds by removing this support just > for a violation of PMS if there is no real problem exposed by it. The 'invariant' restriction on S in PMS is, strictly speaking, stronger than it has to be. However, working out exactly what set of weaker rules would be ok proved to be too difficult -- historically, Portage has had various different behaviours for global scope variables that are assigned variable values. Thus, PMS is the way it is there because we know for sure that if you follow those rules you're safe; if you don't, you'll definitely cause problems for EAPI 4, and you may or may not get away with it for earlier EAPIs. It's a bit like assuming that it's ok to dereference a null pointer and get a zero, since that's what one particular system does... -- Ciaran McCreesh