Re: [gentoo-dev] EAPI-2 do* functions die

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:45:52 +0400
Peter Volkov <pva@g.o> wrote:
> В Пнд, 08/09/2008 в 23:34 +0000, Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto пишет:
> > So we're talking about adding the following to EAPI-2:
>
> While it's not too late. Can we make dobin, doman and other do*
> functions finally die in EAPI=2? I've reviewed discussions on -dev
> [1],[2] and bug 138792 [3] and seems that the only possible stopper is
> that implementing them as functions makes impossible to use them with
> xargs. Maybe for such rather rare case we should create new functions
> (xdo{bin,*} or whatever name is better)?

I'd suggest holding off on that one. There're at least three different
ways of implementing it, all with different implications, and it needs
proper discussion.

* Using traps looks nice on the surface, but in practice they're
sufficiently weird on things like conditionals that they're probably not
a useful solution.

* Banning xargs and doing them as functions is a possibility, but far
from ideal, especially since it's just working around a Portage
limitation.

* Making Portage support subprocess dies is the nice solution, but this
probably isn't an EAPI 2 timeframe feature.

In addition, having nonfatal versions of commands is also useful in
practice. Exheres has a 'nonfatal' command, so you can do 'nonfatal
dodoc foo bar baz'. This also needs discussing before deciding upon a
spec.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh