On Sonntag, 14. September 2008, Zac Medico wrote:
> Well, I'm open to alternative suggestions. Please see the previous
> email in which I've attempted to explain the reasoning for the given
> approach [1]. It seems to me that this approach is well suited for
> solving cases in which temporary simultaneous installation of
> blocking packages is needed.

Thanks for pointing me to it, Zac. I do not pretend to be able to pull the 
white bunny out of the black hat, presenting you the perfect alternative, 
especially since you've thought about it a lot more than me. I just feel 
uncomfortable, having ebuilds overwrite each others files. According to the 
referenced data, it'll work around a number of issues. The time will show, If 
real hard blocker issues remain a problem, I guess.


> Again, please see my previous email on this subject [1]. The reason
> that I think we should change the meaning of the '!' symbol is that
> the majority of existing EAPI 0 or 1 blockers appear to fit the new
> meaning already. So, we'll only have to use the new !!atom syntax
> for special cases in which temporary simultaneous installation of
> blocking packages must be explicitly forbidden.

Just the majority or pretty much all and the others are easily to find out and 
moved to EAPI 2, so the point I raised ceases to exist!?


I want to share another thought regarding this proposed addtion:

!! has the double meaning a) "unmerge the following ebuilds later" and 
b) "overwriting files of the following ebuilds while merging changes makes 
them owned by the freshly merged ebuild"

so we have one symbol denoting two different commands, which could find use 
independently. Moreso, if we add more of these symbols to express something 
different, our syntax may look almost like Lisp in the end:

 use? ( ! ( X ( Y ( || ( ( foo bar ) baz ) ) ) ) ) )

Looks ugly, doesnt it? 

How about using two symbols for !! and having the possibility to aggreagate 
them, e.g.

use? ( !XY||: ( ( foo bar ) baz ) )

instead?!


Carsten