On Sun, 8 Jun 2008 20:48:41 +0530
"Arun Raghavan" <arunisgod@...> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 8:29 PM, Ciaran McCreesh
> <ciaran.mccreesh@...> wrote:
> [...]
> > This isn't as simple as you think, since quite a few of these
> > utilities are called using 'xargs' and so have to be binaries.
> > Whilst Paludis can deal with external binaries triggering a die
> > because exheres needs it (exheres has everything as fatal except
> > where preceeded by 'nonfatal'), I'm not sure that Portage can just
> > now.
> 
> I didn't understand you. Even if the external binary can't call die,
> what's to prevent the caller from dying based on the return value of
> the called binary?

Then we're back to having people do dobin || die, which is precisely
what we're trying to solve.

> > Also note that quite a few packages rely upon the current nonfatal
> > behaviour, so it'd need to be an EAPI bump...
> 
> It should not be necessary to define a new EAPI to make sure packages
> are not broken.

Yes it should. It's a change in behaviour in functionality upon which
quite a lot of things depend.

> If there really are a lot of packages that rely on the
> current behaviour, we can easily implement this in a phased manner:
> make it a QA notice to start with and make it default behaviour after
> 3-6 months or whatever time period is suitable.

EAPIs *are* the phased manner.

> BTW, do you have any examples of packages relying on non-fatal
> behaviour for do* stuff? It'd be interesting to see why it might be
> necessary.

Various things do dodoc AUTHORS README BLAH BLAH, even when some of
them don't exist. And more do it via eclass variables like DOCS.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh