Re: [gentoo-council] Agenda (draft) for November meeting 2009-11-09

[Patrick Lauer]

> On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 1:17 PM, Patrick Lauer <patrick@g.o> wrote:
> > I'd like council to discuss what I consider a major bug in PMS -
> > see the discussion at
> > http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-pms/msg_95a13d880eb521b13d7090f30350c26
> >a.xml
>
> Could the both of you please flesh out a proposal on how you'd expect
> the council to solve these issues?

Problem:
Usage of bash 3.2 features in ebuilds and eclasses where PMS forces bash 3.0
Apart from potentially breaking backwards compatibility etc. this is an 
inconsistency between specification and product.

Possible solutions:
1) Forbid bash 3.2 features.
Impact: Cleanup of many eclasses, lots of work for maintainers, removes 
actively used and useful functionality. Makes many people unhappy.

2) Fix PMS to require bash 3.2
Impact: one-line patch to PMS, small reduction in backwards compatibility
As bash 3.2 was added Oct 2006 and stabled May 2007 this would only affect 
systems not updated for over 2 years, which is far beyond our usual support 
horizon. Thus compatibility impact is negligible.

3) Ignore it
Impact: Well, it's what we've been doing for a year now. Seems to work out ok, 
but it's slightly unsatisfying.

4) something else?

I strongly suggest (2) since it has a very low impact, comes at no cost to 
maintainers and removes the need for endless further discussions of the topic.


> It would best if, on top of telling
> what should be done, you explained why it should be done this way.
> Raising the questions is already interesting but proposing answers is
> even better. You may have done that elsewhere before but summarizing
> it here would help tremendously. And by the way those who know they
> will disagree with the above posters are welcome to make proposals of
> their own. It would be nice if we'd all get an opportunity to discuss
> it here before the council meeting.
>
> Denis.
>