[gentoo-portage-dev] ebuild strengths/weaknesses

[Daniel Robbins <drobbins@gentoo.org>]

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On Sat, 2003-12-06 at 12:41, Jon Portnoy wrote:
> Please keep in mind that a significant number of users have expressed a 
> fondness for ebuilds precisely because they can apply simple bash 
> scripting knowledge to create a complex build script. Any new format 
> should probably aim for similar syntax for precisely that reason.

You mean similar ease of use, I think. It's hard to use bash syntax and
have a high-performance system. But I know where you're coming from. The
goal is to make them easier to use and more powerful than ebuilds. 

I'd contend that ebuilds aren't the pinnacle of usability, although they
do have many strengths. There are aspects to ebuilds that can make them
tricky to use such as tons of conditionals all over the place, strange
unexpected side-effects caused by unexpected orders of execution,
limitations of what conditionals are actually *legal* in ebuilds ("foo?"
vs. "use foo" vs. "if [ ]"), etc.) There is a lot to improve. We'll want
to make the new format better while keeping or surpassing existing
strengths.

Then when we get to eclasses, we start to see that we are maxing out the
potential for a totally-bash-based system.

My recommendation: for all the stuff you like about ebuilds, make sure
they are in the requirements.

Regards,

Daniel

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