>>>>> On Mon, 12 Mar 2012, Rich Freeman wrote:

> Well, we do always have the option of keeping the EAPI= syntax but
> making it more strict per the proposals, and then grepping it out
> rather than sourcing the ebuild. That seems likely to always work
> with bash. Then if we ever switched to some other format we'd have
> to reconsider whether we want to tweak this approach further or
> adopt GLEP 55.

As long as we stay with some textual format for ebuilds, the "header
comment" approach will always work, if its syntax is general enough.
(For example, requiring # as comment introducer would be stupid.)

And I don't expect that we will move away from bash within the next
two or three years, so there won't be any upgrade problems for systems
with old package managers.

> If you envision a future where big changes are inevitable over the
> long term, then just going with GLEP 55 is probably the cleanest
> solution. If you envision a future where we are likely to never move
> away from bash, or if we do it is so far off that we're content to
> let our children deal with it, then other approaches may seem nicer.

> I guess the question is whether we need to future-proof against a
> future that may never come. Then again, as we're seeing from systemd
> a lot of stuff that "always" was done in bash doesn't necessarily
> have to stay that way.

See above, even if we should ever move away from bash, GLEP 55 is
still not needed.

Ulrich