Re: [gentoo-pms] License for code snippets included in PMS

[David Leverton <levertond@googlemail.com>]

On 13 March 2011 16:40, Brian Harring <ferringb@gmail.com> wrote:
> This section wasn't accurate, as such I threw it out- attached is a
> brain dump of exactly what characteristics can be relied on for
> env saving, and should be reasonably complete.
>
> Could stand to have some comments added though.

As discussed on IRC, the use of "declare" here is problematic, because
inside a function it acts like "local", even if said function is part
of the PM that sources the ebuild.  This would put a pretty nasty
constraint on the PM implementation, and wouldn't work in eclasses
anyway because of the "inherit" function.  Arrays can still be used
simply by not using "declare" and just assigning them, which doesn't
have the implicit local attached, so all that's needed is to change
"declare -a ARRAY_VARIABLE=( a b )" in the patch to simply
"ARRAY_VARIABLE=( a b )".

(See also http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309369, in which this
caused problems with loading environment.bz2 files.)

As an aside, bash 4.2 has "declare -g" to override the implicit local,
but it'll be a while before we can start using that in ebuilds.