Re: [gentoo-dev] The future of eclasses

[Tod M. Neidt]

Hi!

My thoughts for what their worth:

On Thu, 2002-02-07 at 13:27, Karl Trygve Kalleberg wrote:
> > This is all almost certainly portage v2 stuff. However I'd like everyone
> > working on portage (e.g. Bevin, with whom I've spoken) to know where we
> > stand, to coordinate our efforts. As always, any ideas, forecasts,
> > suggestions etc. are always welcome.
>
> I like the idea. If its documentation becomes part of the ebuild howto,
> it will get adopted fairly quickly.
I too find the concept of eclasses "sexy." Not being a KDE user my
experience with them has been limited, but I do appreciate the
motivation behind them.  However, ....

>
> The main concern Hallski and me (and possibly others, such as John
> Stalker, if memory serves) was that the current ebuild system mirrors
> the manual build process so closely that external contributors have
> little or no difficulty sending us ebuilds.
The structure of ebuilds being analogous to the ./configure, make, make
install manual build sequence is a tremendously valuable "feature" for
gentoo users in my opinion.  Holds to the "form follows function"
principal and is relatively transparent to a user who wants to tweak an
ebuild to suit their needs with minimal effort.  I admit that I am an
unabashed promoter of the KISS principal (one of my daily working
mantras, along with "check the connections" :)  Is their anyway that
eclasses could be "hidden" in portage so that the visible ebuilds
remains simple, i.e at least gives the appearance of being analogous to
./configure, make, make install?  As John Stalker stated in another
post, the ability to understand, or at least think you understand, with
minimal effort what is happening when you merge a particular ebuild is
attractive. 

 
> What plagues many non-kde ebuilds is that their build systems are fairly
> non-standard. And even packages with seemingly standard build systems
> quickly turn out to have both minor and major flaws (Mailman is a good
> example of a horrible build system that on the surface looks nice, but
> in practice turns out to be a real bitch).

Many of the applications that I am interested in have roots in 30+ year
old FORTRAN and have never even had a Makefile provide in the tarball. 
Yes, they are still of value, the kind that only 30+ years of peer
review can provide.

Again, I find the eclasses concept sexy.  I am just concerned with what
might be lost, especially by the Gentoo user, in their application.

Has anyone tabulated an objective Advantages/Disadvantages analysis of
eclasses?

tod