Re: [gentoo-dev] Ebuild documentation, needs updates?

[Alec Warner]

Graham Murray wrote:
> Alec Warner <antarus@g.o> writes:
>
>> This feature is not available in stable portage, which is why its not
>> documented.  And yes there are many other features that lack
>> documentation.
>
> But should it not be documented in the ebuild man files which come
> with the versions of portage which *do* support the feature? I know
> that it is not always done, but when new features/switches/options are
> added to any program, should the man (or info, pod etc) file not be
> updated to include them?

Offhand, maybe ;)

The problem we have is people read it in the manpage and then tend to 
use it in our tree.  Putting this in the tree will blow up anything 
trying to use it (except for perhaps the bsd tree, since they 
occasionally set a minimum portage version, but being ~arch all the time 
they have that particular advantage).

So generally things are documented as they become supported; in this 
case it will be documented when EAPI is bumped (I assume anyway, there 
has been discussion that certain items in DEPEND aren't part of a given 
EAPI specification, but I'll spare you the details).

If you are using an overlay, you should be able to use this 
functionality; assuming all overlay consumers have a high enough 
portage.  If they aren't, it will die.

Portage features themselves are tracked via portage-commits, bugs, and 
svn (ie if you want to know when portage gained this support, we suggest 
you look there).

If you look in the NEWS file in trunk:
News (mainly features/major bug fixes)

portage-2.1.2
------------
* DEPEND atoms support SLOT dependencies of the form 
${CATEGORY}/${PN}:${SLOT}.

Thanks,
Alec Warner
antarus@g.o
-- 
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list