Re: [gentoo-project] Re: [gentoo-dev-announce] Call for agenda items, council meeting 8/October/2017 18:00 UTC

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 4:05 PM, Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
> W dniu pon, 02.10.2017 o godzinie 22∶01 +0200, użytkownik Kristian
> Fiskerstrand napisał:
>> On 10/02/2017 09:58 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> > Does the PMS actually define what the correct behavior is for this
>> > syntax?
>>
>> it evaluates to a true, i.e always valid/resolved. And although
>> explicitly naming an empty group in an ebuild is, probably?, not useful,
>> I don't see why we'd have a definition that errors out on explicit
>> definition but not on an implicit reduction, as the package manager
>> needs to be able to handle the situation anyways. I'm all for banning
>> the empty construct in QA scope though.
>>
>
> Have you read the commit message? The current spec makes no sense by
> itself, and no package manager has been following it for 6+ years.
>

IMO the spec ought to define a correct behavior, which portage
follows.  Maybe that means changing the spec.  Maybe that means
changing portage.  It sounds like the two don't match right now and
that isn't really ideal, though it isn't necessarily a crisis at least
in the explicit case which is degenerate.  I imagine that if the
implicit case were misbehaving we'd have heard of it by now, but I
can't speak to what portage actually is doing and whether it follows
the spec.

And by all means ban explicit empty ()'s as a QA practice.


-- 
Rich