Re: [gentoo-dev] RFD: EAPI specification in ebuilds

[Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 7:20 PM, Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 10:03 PM, Brian Harring <ferringb@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Pragmatic reality, the eapi function actually would work fine.  As
>> pointed out elsewhere, bash parses as it goes- which isn't going to
>> change.
>
> Unless the ebuild isn't written in bash...

I'd opt for a different extension in that case actually.

>
> How do you source the ebuild if you don't know what to use to source
> it?  How do you know what to use to source it if you don't know the
> EAPI?  Right now all the existing EAPIs use bash, but there is no
> reason the file couldn't be xml, or python, or just about anything
> else.
>
> If we want to allow for that kind of flexibility, then it might make
> sense to go ahead and state that our convention is to stick EAPI=5 in
> one of the first few lines of the ebuild, or inside a comment, but
> also go a step further and state that the text "EAPI=" cannot appear
> elsewhere in the ebuild (or perhaps within the first 10 lines).  Just
> about any file format we might use would allow us to make "EAPI="
> appear in it, but not all could guarantee that it would occur at the
> start of a line, or at the start of a line immediately after a #.
>
> In any case, I can really see the KISS value in a very rigid syntax
> that is trivial to parse.  Stuff like this almost makes me wish our
> ebuilds already were xml files or such, with bash embedded inside
> sections.  Finding a particular tag in an xml file is trivial as the
> fundamentals haven't changed in 15 years.

I will stab the next person who suggests 'xml-like ebuilds.'

-A

>
> Rich
>