On 17:58 Tue 13 Sep     , Patrick Lauer wrote:
> On 09/13/11 16:44, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> > It's because people want to pretend that it's possible for 
> > incredibly outdated systems (those with bash-3 only) to be updated.
> 
> Actually it's worse - PMS enforces this, and the only clean way out is 
> to patch/fix/extend PMS to allow bash4 - but that breaks compatibility 
> in silly ways.
> 
> The proper way to handle that? I'm not sure, since we had a long fight 
> to get PMS to acknowledge bash 3.2 instead of 3.0 I'm mostly ignoring 
> PMS as it doesn't care about reality.

Thanks for the reminder; I looked, and it turns out that we now have a 
great precedent. Quoting PMS:

"The required bash version was retroactively updated from 3.0 to 3.2 in 
November 2009 (see http://www.gentoo. 
org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs/20091109.txt)."

So we could just retroactively update it again and let people scream if 
they're actually affected by this.

> > We're stuck in this limbo because "we" have apparently decided that 
> > just waiting a year, as we used to do, isn't good enough anymore; 
> > but at the same time, we don't have a better mechanism in place yet. 
> > So we're waffling around, doing nothing.
> 
> That's not quite correct for this case, but it shows that we need to 
> discuss destructive changes (in the sense that they are not 
> backwards-compatible etc.) to have any decent progress

Maybe a way to set tree-level dependencies/EAPIs/features is something 
we seriously need to get going on.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Council Member / Sr. Developer
Gentoo Linux
Blog: http://dberkholz.com