Re: [gentoo-dev] einfo / ewarn banners and die messages

[Aron Griffis]

Matthew Kenendy wrote:	[Sat Nov 13 2004, 06:44:49AM EST]
> Up until this thread, the solution was simple:
>
> 	doins *.fasl *.dat

Simple but sloppy and error-prone.  What if the *.fasl files are
missing?  You won't know about it until the somebody reports a bug.
Ideally we want to be catching errors before the users, and it would
be easier if the ebuilds didn't allow this kind of sloppiness.

> So what will that need to be if doins calls die because a file '*.dat'
> can't be found?

Good question.  Neither of the following works, but we want something
short:

    [[ -e *.dat ]]      # *.dat doesn't expand (semantics of [[ ]])
    [ -e *.dat ]        # *.dat expands and causes an error

How about this?

    doins *.fasl
    exists *.dat && doins *.dat

In ebuild.sh:

    exists() {
        [[ -e $1 ]]
    }

This works because the glob is expanded before calling exists(), which
then only needs to test the first argument to make a determination.
If the argument is a file expanded from the glob, goodness.  If the
file is the glob itself, it won't be found.

> Perhaps doins should take a --strict argument, whose absence will be
> compatible with what I do now and whose presence will be appreciated by
> those developers forgetting to install init.d run scripts etc.

Same as telling devs to append ||die as we've been saying all along.
Isn't it better to optimize for the common case by dying when files
are missing?

Regards,
Aron

--
Aron Griffis
Gentoo Linux Developer