Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Issues regarding glep-55 (Was: [gentoo-council] Re: Preliminary Meeting-Topics for 12 February 2009)

[Steve Dibb <beandog@gentoo.org>]

Richard Freeman wrote:
> I still don't see why we need to be encoding metadata in filenames. PERL 
> doesn't care what a file extension is, python doesn't care, bzip2 
> doesn't care, tar doesn't care, gzip doesn't care, and even ld-linux.so 
> doesn't care.  I'm sure that in at least some of these cases they end up 
> parsing parts of the file twice - once to figure out what it is, and the 
> second time to actually handle it.  I'm actually hard pressed to think 
> of any unix-based software that uses the filename to store a mandatory 
> file format versioning specifier of some kind.

I have to admit I'm in the same camp with Richard, and don't understand 
the necessity.  I'm also opposed to creating arbitrary suffixes to the 
ebuild extension, for cosmetic and compatibility reasons.

Plus, I don't really grasp the whole "we have to source the whole ebuild 
to know the EAPI version" argument.  It's one variable, in one line. 
Can't a simple parser get that and go from there?

Steve