[gentoo-project] Re: Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2013-09-10

[Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org>]

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> In two weeks from now, the council will meet again. This is the time
> to raise and prepare items that the council should put on the agenda
> to discuss or vote on.

I'd like to ask the council to perform two votes about behaviour of
install functions and about default src_install(). This arises from
bug 481664, see the long discussion there [1].

In a nutshell: The default src_install() implementation in EAPIs 4
and 5 is flawed because it doesn't account for the DOCS variable being
defined but empty. It ends up calling dodoc without any arguments in
this case. This will work in Portage (with a QA warning), but the
stricter implementation in Paludis will error out.

1. I propose that we clarify PMS wording to say that the do*() install
   functions take one or filenames as arguments [2]. This would match
   established behaviour of all package managers.

2. There is consensus that default src_install should be fixed in the
   next EAPI. The question is if we should retroactively change the
   specification [3]. Effectively, that wouldn't change Portage
   behaviour much (only suppress a QA warning), because it doesn't
   make any difference if checking for empty DOCS takes place in dodoc
   or in the caller. OTOH, it turns out that no ebuild is directly
   affected by the flaw in the package manager function (only
   indirectly, because the PM's implementation was copied to some
   eclasses). So maybe this change is not so urgent.

To summarise the timeline of events so far:
- Long-time Portage behaviour is that do* functions error out when
  called with no arguments.
- PMS has documented this Portage behaviour, but wording isn't very
  clear for the issue at hand.
- Other package managers also follow the Portage implementation.
- EAPI 4 has introduced a default src_install function. The function
  doesn't account for empty DOCS.
- Subsequently, the EAPI 4 default was copied to src_install of a few
  eclasses (e.g., multilib-minimal.eclass).
- Portage was then changed to allow dodoc with no arguments [4].
  Other do* functions keep their strict behaviour, though.
- Some ebuilds started setting empty DOCS. This succeeds with Portage,
  but fails with other package managers. Bug 480892 was filed.
- Recently, a QA warning was added to dodoc in Portage [5], so that
  ebuilds using empty DOCS can be spotted and fixed.

Ulrich

[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481664
[2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.pms/764
[3] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.pms/765
[4] http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/portage.git;a=commit;h=6271cfe43dcf0cb42d4c2c0b772a7be17be78d2f
[5] http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/portage.git;a=commit;h=83ac345bb227dc1752a895d53037fce36c9c7966

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