Re: [gentoo-dev] EAPI 2 policy for portage tree

["Robert R. Russell" <nahoy_kbiki@hushmail.com>]

On Monday 08 December 2008 06:00:10 pm Jean-Marc Hengen wrote:
<snip>
> This mail is about EAPI usage in the portage tree. Let me describe it,
> with what happened today: I'm running a mostly stable system (91 of 1255
> installed packages are unstable), but I test here and there some
> packages. On of the packages, which I installed and is currently masked
> unstable, is dev-util/cmake-2.6.2. I use it on a daily basis and happy
> with it so far. Today, while updating, portage wanted to downgrade cmake
> to the stable release, due to all cmake 2.6.x version masked by EAPI 2.
> The cmake-2.6.2 ebuild was updated to use EAPI 2 (along with fixing a
> bug). My rule of thumb is to only use unstable on none system packages
>
<snip>
>
> With kind regards,
> Jean-Marc Hengen, a happy gentoo user

The problem is not that an EAPI 2 supporting portage is unstable or that he is 
using a ~arch version of one particular package, but the during a bugfix the 
maintainer moved the ebuild to EAPI 2 without a version bump forcing 
Jean-Marc to downgrade to the stable version. The question on policy is, can 
a maintainer upgrade an ebuild to the latest EAPI while doing some other 
bugfixing without a version bump?

My personal opinion on this matter is pick one of the following:
1)  perform the bugfix without a version bump and remain at the current EAPI 
version
2)  perform the bugfix with a version bump and remain at the current EAPI 
version
3)  perform the bugfix with a version bump and upgrade to the latest EAPI
Options 1 and 2 are how most updates are done, the user can mask the latest 
version or upgrade. Option 3 allows the user to continue using the previous 
version while they decide to update to a portage version that supports the 
new EAPI.

I would prefer that option 3 be made policy because I run several ~arch 
packages that either don't have a stable version (kradio) or have a feature 
that I need (gentoo-sources), and will not be pushed to stable immediately 
for various reasons from lack of maintainer time to everybody says it 
conflicts with major pieces of the system (Firefox 3, 64 bit netscape-flash, 
and xorg).