[gentoo-dev] rfc: epause instead of sleep in ebuilds

[Ciaran McCreesh]

Currently, we have something like 200 ebuilds which call 'sleep'. How
would people feel about replacing this with an eutils function called
'epause' (or 'esleep', or 'ezzz', or esitaroundforabit)? This would give
us two advantages:

* For non-interactive builds (eg catalyst, chroot testing), an
environment variable could be set which makes epause not actually pause.
For certain packages on certain systems, the sleep takes longer than the
rest of the build...

* The behaviour of sleep isn't entirely standardised across different
UNIX implementations. It would be better to have one place to make any
changes needed by these new non-Linuxy platforms.

I'd suggest an implementation along the following lines:

# Wait for the supplied number of seconds. If no argument is supplied,
# defaults to five seconds. If the EPAUSE_IGNORE env var is set, don't
# wait.
epause() {
    if [ -z "$EPAUSE_IGNORE" ] ; then
        sleep ${1:-5}
    fi
}

Thoughts? I'd be happy to do all the work :)

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Sparc, MIPS, Vim, Fluxbox)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm