Re: [gentoo-dev] Versioning of eclasses and possibly functions inside ebuilds

[Jeroen Roovers <jer@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, 28 Dec 2011 19:36:01 -0800
Brian Harring <ferringb@gmail.com> wrote:

> People have problems as is dealing w/ eclasses changing and their 
> dependencies in external repositories not being updated; this 
> complicates that issue and introduces the same potential into 
> gentoo-x86 itself.  That's not beneficial.

I agree with nearly all of that: introducing changes to an eclass
usually means going through the whole tree and fixing what breaks.
That's a lot more easy to fix than adding more layers of indirection
based on a variable's value and adjusting the value according to the
time the ebuild was written versus when the eclass was changed.

> Thing to keep in mind beyond the potential for confusion the
> proposals entail were they implemented, is the implementation
> itself. Timeslices?  python eclass api versions (when people have
> problems figuring out the existing, *singular* version)?  These
> things aren't going to be simple which means more than likely,
> they're going to break, and more than likely it's going to be a PITA
> to maintain it.

Last time I took tranquilisers and set myself up to read python.eclass,
I found that it still doesn't break at 80 characters. Apparently even
that can't be fixed in a timely fashion.

Assing even more layers of mystification like:

if [[ PYTHON_ECLASS_API = 2 ]]; then
	python_pkg_setup() {

or even:

python_pkg_setup() {
	if [[ PYTHON_ECLASS_API = 2 ]]; then

would be insane, in my opinion.

Also, from the perspective of an ebuild writer, setting

PYTHON_ECLASS_API=2
inherit python

would be meaningless lacking a very clear description of what the
number 2 means.


     jer