Re: [gentoo-dev] Collecting opinions about GLEP 55 and alternatives

[Ravi Pinjala]

Petteri Räty wrote:
> Let's try something new. I would like to get opinions from as many
> people as possible about GLEP 55 and alternatives listed here in order
> to get some idea what the general developer pool thinks. Everyone is
> only allowed to post a single reply to this thread in order to make it
> easy to read through. The existing thread should be used for actual
> discussion about the GLEP and the alternatives. This should be a useful
> experiment to see if we can control ourselves :)
>
> My notes so far:
>
> 1) Status quo
>   - does not allow changing inherit
>   - bash version in global scope
>   - global scope in general is quite locked down
>
> 2) EAPI in file extension
>   - Allows changing global scope and the internal format of the ebuild
>   a) .ebuild-<eapi>
>     - ignored by current Portage
>   b) .<eapi>.ebuild
>     - current Portage does not work with this
>   c) .<eapi>.<new extension>
>     - ignored by current Portage
>
> 3) EAPI in locked down place in the ebuild
>   - Allows changing global scope
>   - EAPI can't be changed in an existing ebuild so the PM can trust
>     the value in the cache
>   - Does not allow changing versioning rules unless version becomes a
>     normal metadata variable
>     * Needs more accesses to cache as now you don't have to load older
>       versions if the latest is not masked
>   a) <new extension>
>   b) new subdirectory like ebuilds/
>   - we could drop extension all together so don't have to argue about
>     it any more
>   - more directory reads to get the list of ebuilds in a repository
>   c) .ebuild in current directory
>   - needs one year wait
>
> Regards,
> Petteri
>

Another option which I haven't seen mentioned here yet would be to just
specify that the method of finding the EAPI depends on the file
extension. Then, anything with a .ebuild extension can be sourced with
bash to find the EAPI, and ebuild formats incompatible with that could
use another file extension. This would work with current package
managers, while still providing a mechanism for incompatible format
changes in the future. It's also aesthetically nicer than current
proposals, since the file extension would indicate something about the
contents of the file.

Or, to put it another way, this would formalize the difference between
the ebuild format (which is currently bash throughout the tree), and the
EAPI. I don't think anybody would oppose a file extension change for a
format change, as opposed to an EAPI change.

--Ravi