On Saturday 21 March 2009 21:55:20 Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Sat, 21 Mar 2009 21:53:16 +0100
>
> Patrick Lauer <patrick@g.o> wrote:
> > Because, as you have noticed before, developers get confused which
> > eapi has which features available. And eapi1 is a superset of eapi0,
> > so we don't have to rewrite tons of things.
>
> So? When people do new things, they can move the EAPI forward. That's
> not a reason to modify existing things.

The added complexity of having a dozen eapis does not offer any benefits to 
the average developer. Limiting the amount of complexity tends to reduce the 
amount of errors, be it simple developer mistakes or unexpected interaction 
errors between different EAPIs in the package manager.

> > > Introducing a policy encouraging moving things that definitely
> > > aren't in the least bit likely to be a system dep on a bump, sure.
> > > Making 1 or 2 the default for new packages, sure. But rewriting
> > > existing things? That's just an accident waiting to happen.
> >
> > What kind of accident do you expect to happen?
>
> The same kind that always happens when lots of ebuilds get changed.

... lots of new features and a few bugs that get fixed the next day? Hey, that 
sounds quite bad. And maybe some new herd testers? How rude!

So what technical reason(s) do we have to keep archaic EAPIs around forever?

Patrick