Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Tightening EAPI rules

[Tom Wijsman <TomWij@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 14:03:49 +0100
Dirkjan Ochtman <djc@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 1:43 PM, Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org>
> wrote:
> > The daily updated stats [2] show a slow general trend down.
> > There's historical data (well, just a few days right now at [3]
> 
> What are you looking at here? .ebuild files in the tree? Or latest
> version per-package?

The same as the repoman warnings do, the .ebuild files; to confirm this
`grep -r --include='*.ebuild'
'^\w*EAPI=\(['"'"'"]1['"'"'"]\|1\)' /usr/portage/ | wc -l` yields 361.

> Old EAPI versions are obviously only a burden for developers if there
> are actually developers looking at those packages/versions/ebuilds...

Maintainership over a package would imply that you also maintain all of
its versions, unless you restrict yourself (but then the rest goes m-n);
they don't necessarily sit in the way for a maintainer, however, there's
still the possibility for people to use them as well as that they cause
bugs that stay around and act as noise. But there's something else:

Apart from that, they however sit in the way of deprecating support for
that EAPI; at one point it becomes tedious to have to support 10 EAPIs
in our code (eg. Portage), hence we should aim to deprecate versions of
a few years old. Keeping old stuff around can take its toll...

-- 
With kind regards,

Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
Gentoo Developer

E-mail address  : TomWij@gentoo.org
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