[gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-soc] Re: Progress on Universal Select Tool

[Sebastian Pipping <webmaster@hartwork.org>]

Sérgio Almeida wrote:
> user action bin {
> 	description "Change Python's Version"
> 	type sym
> 	sym python {
> 		bin python
> 		target /usr/bin/python 
> 		prefix /usr/bin/ 
> 		regexp python([0-9]+\.[0-9]+$)
> 		sym python-config {
> 			bin python-config
> 			destination /usr/bin/python-config
> 			prefix /usr/bin/ 
> 			regexp python([0-9]+\.[0-9]+)-config($)
> 		} python-config
> 	} python
> } bin
> 
> Soon urged the need for more complex lexical analysis and started
> implementing lex rules and yacc skeleton.
> 
> With this step a question bounced into my head. 
> 
> Am I reinventing the wheel? 
> Why implement lex/yacc to translate a block of code into a python's
> block of code?
> Why not use plain python in modules?
> 
> After discussing with mentor, we decided to adopt python as the base
> language for uselect modules.

It seems to me that the original langauge is "static"/"descriptive"
while Python is not.  Why not move to XML or JSON (former seems more
common with Gentoo) instead of Python?  Think about how much easier it
is to pull information from metadata.xml than from .ebuild files - it's
the same difference in your case.

You know much better where you want to go with this than I do, but
please triple-check this move, as you cannot go back.

Thanks for listening,



Sebastian