>>>>> On Wed, 13 Sep 2023, Eli Schwartz wrote:

>> That's a rather bold statement. I can imagine a number of possible
>> failures, e.g. no space left on device, quota exceeded, or a low-level
>> I/O error of the filesystem. Also fork or exec of the cat command could
>> fail (e.g. out of memory).
>> 
>> While either of these may be unlikely here, best practice is to check
>> for errors of _all_ external commands.

> The implementation of `die` performs a fork+exec of the sed command,
> invokes eerror (many times!) which forks to pipe, invokes $() which
> forks, and could behave abnormally due to out of memory. It is not safe
> to treat `|| die` as error recovery for an out of memory condition.

> The implementation of `die` performs multiple writes to files inside of
> ${PORTAGE_BUILDDIR}, and could behave abnormally due to write failures.
> It is not safe to treat `|| die` as error recovery for a write failure
> of the ${PORTAGE_BUILDDIR} drive (whatever the reason for that write
> failure).

An eclass must not rely on implementation details of any specific
package manager.

"die [...] aborts the build process."
https://projects.gentoo.org/pms/8/pms.html#x1-12600012.3.6

So please report a Portage (or other package manager) bug if you can
reproduce a condition where die doesn't abort the build process.

> (And the `|| die` is added to the next revision of this patch either way.)

Thanks.

Ulrich