Richard Freeman wrote:
> I still don't see why we need to be encoding metadata in filenames.

Correct.  GLEP 55 tries to solve a technical implementation issue by
exposing meta data in the filename.  Extremely bad form/design, IMHO.

> PERL doesn't care what a file extension is, python doesn't care, bzip2 
> doesn't care, tar doesn't care, gzip doesn't care, and even ld-linux.so 
> doesn't care.  I'm sure that in at least some of these cases they end up 
> parsing parts of the file twice - once to figure out what it is, and the 
> second time to actually handle it.  I'm actually hard pressed to think 
> of any unix-based software that uses the filename to store a mandatory 
> file format versioning specifier of some kind.

All good points.  I cannot believe there exists no other way to solve
this technical issue other than resorting to such a non-Unix-like idea.
Obviously all of the software packages cited above endeavor to avoid
such nastiness.

I do not understand why anyone is willing to accept putting version info
in the filename/extension.  It is inelegant and, frankly, very ugly.  I
have written more in the past on why I think it is a terrible idea, so I
won't repeat it here.

Suffice to say, if something like GLEP 55 is implemented, I will lose a
lot of faith in Gentoo's design, so much so that I will likely join the
ranks of those who abandon it, not only as a dev, but also as a user.

> This seems to me to be a solved problem.  You put a header in a file 
> that tells you how to read the file.  Headers are split into fields and 
> if a program doesn't know what to do with a field it ignores it (or if 
> the header so instructs it doesn't even try to parse the file).  This 
> should be easy to do and keep the file bash-compatible.  Just stick a 
> comment line close to the top of the file and put whatever you want on 
> it.  You could also stick something in metadata.xml (although this makes 
> working with ebuilds outside of a repository more difficult).  You run 
> the file through an algorithm to find out what the EAPI is, and then 
> source it if appropriate.
> 
> Sure, if you make some major change analogous to switching from the .rpm 
> to the .deb package format then maybe an extension change would make 
> sense.  But, why expose the inner workings of the package file format to 
> the filesystem?

+100

						-Joe