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

[Richard Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> 
> ..and it means we can't change name or version rules.
> 

Why?  Just parse the EAPI out of the file before you interpret the 
version and name from the filename.  Indeed - you could have a future 
EAPI remove the name and version from the filename entirely.  If a 
package manager doesn't understand the EAPI in a file it shouldn't do 
anything at all with it.

> ..and it means over doubling the best possible time to work out a
> dependency tree in the common case where the metadata cache is valid.
> 

I can see why it takes an extra pass - but does that mean a doubling of 
time?  Couldn't the EAPI be cached as well to reduce disk access?

> ..and it means we can't make arbitrary format changes.

Well, you would need to preserve the EAPI in the header, but other than 
that you could actually turn an ebuild into an otherwise completely 
binary file, or whatever.  Just how much more flexibility than that is 
needed?