On Wednesday 20 June 2012 16:25:30 Richard Yao wrote:
> Multilib (and/or multiarch) support

Thomas already has multilib documents put together for review.  multiarch 
doesn't make sense for us, and even if it did, there's no way it'd be spec-ed 
out in a reasonable time frame for EAPI=5 (or even 6 or 7 or ...).

> 	The current binaries cause a great deal of pain, particularly when a
> user does not want to upgrade something. I had this problem with WINE
> and glibc because I wanted to avoid the reverse memcpy() fiasco on my
> systems. This situation would have been avoided entirely if the package
> manager supported multilib.

i don't buy this argument and makes me think when you say "multilib", you 
don't actually mean "multilib".

> Automated epatch_user support
> 	Users should be able to test patches without modifying their ebuilds.
> This also saves developer time because we don't need to navigate the
> portage tree (or an overlay), make a change and test it. We could just
> dump the patch in the appropriate directory and build.

putting forth an idea is one thing.  working out the technical aspects is 
different.  this sounds like something destined for EAPI=6: currently, 
epatch_user uses epatch, and that provides a lot of dynamic patch support that 
doesn't fit well with being spec-ed out / encoded in PMS.

> Parallel make checks

SGTM

> POSIX Shell compliance
> 	There has been a great deal of work done to give the user full control
> of what is on his system and there is more that we can do there. In
> particular, I think a lean Gentoo Linux system should be able to use
> busybox sh and nothing else. That requires POSIX shell compliance.
> OpenRC init scripts support this and the configure scripts support this.
> The few exceptions are bugs that are addressed by the Gentoo BSD
> developers. As such, I think we should make EAPI=5 use POSIX shell by
> default. If an ebuild requires bash, we can allow the ebuild to declare
> that (e.g. WANT_SH=bash), but that should be the exception and not the
> rule.

not a chance, and your logic about "choice" really makes no sense in the 
ebuild context.  read the archives wrt Roy Maples (sadly) burning out for in-
depth details as to why this is a no-go.
-mike