Re: [gentoo-dev] News Item: Changes in default VIDEO_CARDS

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Thu, 29 Oct 2015 17:13:29 +0100
Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn <chithanh@g.o> wrote:
> Ciaran McCreesh schrieb:
> > On Thu, 29 Oct 2015 16:22:40 +0100
> > Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn <chithanh@g.o> wrote:
> >> The previous time I wanted to post a news item with USE
> >> dependencies, this was not possible because the
> >> Display-If-Installed dependency atom had to conform to EAPI 0. But
> >> now that all profiles are EAPI 5 this is ok I hope.
> > It's not really clear what the EAPI for the news directory is...
>
> I guess you are right, but as all package managers must now
> understand EAPI 5 dependency atoms, it is not likely that any will
> choke on it.

Well Portage won't, since it doesn't do input validation and will
pretty much allow you to use any EAPI's syntax anywhere. Paludis will
probably warn that you're using an EAPI 5 feature somewhere where EAPI
5 hasn't been declared, since everything that isn't explicitly a
particular EAPI is EAPI 0.

> Besides, existing news items already use
> Display-If-Profile: to point to EAPI 5 profiles.

That isn't how EAPIs work, conceptually. Whenever a PM does something
with a spec, it asks what the EAPI is in the context of that spec,
which in turn depends upon where that spec came from. A user using a
profile with EAPI 5 does not mean that every dep spec is treated as
being EAPI 5 -- the profile EAPI just applies to things from that
particular profiles directory. (And even if it did work the way you
think, users not using an EAPI 5 profile would still need to be able to
parse that news item...)

> But I can ask the Council for clarification on the issue.

Not so much a Council issue as a PMS one, but the trouble is that news
items slightly predate PMS and EAPIs.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh