[gentoo-project] Re: Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2013-04-09

[Ryan Hill]

On Sun, 7 Apr 2013 14:08:57 +0200
"Andreas K. Huettel" <dilfridge@g.o> wrote:

> Am Sonntag, 7. April 2013, 04:05:11 schrieb Ryan Hill:
> > Toolchain packages, for better or worse, are built by eclass.  We are not
> > forward-porting toolchain.eclass every time someone decides there are too
> > many EAPIs in the tree.  Every change to that eclass breaks something (the
> > trick is to break things people don't care about any more and hope no one
> > notices).
>
> I'm sorry, but this comes over roughly like follows:
>
> "We're the only ones doing really complex stuff in the tree, you know,
> eclasses! Can't really be bothered to clean up the code, especially not for
> such pointless things as improvements in package manager handling. Our code
> is highly complex and really fragile, so every small change breaks things.
> We're trying to hide this as well as we can, thank you for not noticing."

Hrm.  I just meant that package eclasses suck. I hate the fact that they
effectively make stable moot.  There is no such thing as a stable keyword for a
package built by an eclass.  It's like working without a net.  When it's a core
system package it's twice as bad.

As far as these eclasses go, toolchain is the worst.  Yes, it is fragile
and complex.  It's over a decade's worth of spaghetti code.  It builds 12 years
of gcc releases.  It's hairy.  Everything depends on everything else, and
everything is based on assumptions and implications that may or may not still
be relevant.  Making "obviously" correct changes has often broken something
somewhere else, time and again.  I'm not telling you this for some kind of
perverse bragging rights.  It's not something to be proud of.  I just want you
to understand how easy it is to fuck things up.

When it breaks, it breaks stable.  I absolutely hate breaking stable.  I lose
sleep over it.

So I'm sorry if I come across as "we can't be bothered", but I'm not changing
things if they don't absolutely need to be changed. There are two of us. Mike
takes care of half the tree.  I have maybe an hour or two for Gentoo a night
and I spend all that time fixing already existing bugs.  I would absolutely
love to overhaul the eclass - I think I would learn a hell of a lot doing it -
but I don't have the time to deal with the fallout and frankly I'm not that
irresponsible that I would put people through that just for my own amusement.

If someone else wants to try and improve the situation, please feel free.

So unless you're lobbying for the actual removal of EAPI 0, which I don't think
you are, I don't think we'll be changing at this time.


-- 
gcc-porting
toolchain, wxwidgets                                     by design, by neglect
@ gentoo.org                                     for a fact or just for effect