[gentoo-dev] Re: don't rely on dynamic deps

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Tom Wijsman posted on Sat, 26 Jul 2014 00:09:58 +0200 as excerpted:

> EAPI specifies what PMs need to conform to, not the other way around;
> EAPI-0 may very well be derived from Portage, that doesn't make such
> side features that have not been specified in EAPI-0 a part of EAPI-0.

Not being around at the time, you may not know some of the history, but 
feel free to ask Ciaranm if you need a more authoritative source.

The thing is, EAPI-0 was not originally completely specified, and to my 
knowledge, remains that way, because that would have been real-world 
essentially impossible to do.  Instead, a convenient shortcut was taken.  
EAPI-0 was defined as what portage did at the time, with EAPI-1 for sure 
and I believe EAPI-2 at least, being defined as the the previous EAPI, 
with specifically defined changes, but with the base EAPI still only 
fuzzily defined as, basically, what portage did at the time.

And since the beginning, while there have been other unapproved EAPIs not 
allowed in the main gentoo tree, because portage was and remains the 
official default PM, no EAPI has been approved for main-tree deployment 
until portage had a working implementation.

So while portage can and certainly does have bugs where it doesn't meet 
EAPI requirements, particularly for behavior there since EAPI-0 and not 
specifically defined to be different in a specific EAPI since then, to 
the extent that PMS applies at all, the interpretation of PMS must still 
be read in the context of what portage did all those years ago with the 
original EAPI-0 spec, since EAPI-0 was /defined/ based on portage 
behavior at the time.

Which then begs the question[1] I asked, how old /is/ this dynamic-deps 
behavior?  Does it extend back to EAPI-0?  My gut sense from memory as a 
user back then and now is that it does, but that's simply a gut sense I'm 
ill equipped to go back and verify.

---
[1] Begs the question:  Yes, I'm aware of the legal and philosophical 
"circular logic" usage, now generally legacy in terms of real-world use 
except in the philosophic and legal areas.  I deliberately choose to use 
the phrase in the newer and now much more common sense, rhetorically 
personifying the question such that it can "beg to be asked".

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman