Re: [gentoo-dev] GLEP 55

[Richard Freeman]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:09:04 -0600
> Joe Peterson <lavajoe@g.o> wrote:
>> Debunked according to whom?  I believe that some, including you,
>> believe you debunked them, but I do not believe there was wholesale
>> agreement from the dev community.
>
> That doesn't really matter. Most of the dev community don't care to
> understand the underlying issue, so all they need to do is go along
> with the informed decision that the Council was supposed to have made
> on their behalf.
>

By that logic (that mere ordinary devs need to be guided by their more 
informed elected leaders), we're doing EXACTLY what you propose.  The 
informed decision by the Council was to defer the GLEP.  As a result the 
lesser devs are going along with that decision and not implementing it.

The fact is that most devs probably do care to understand the underlying 
issues.  Many just happen to disagree with you.

I still haven't seen a good argument as to why the EAPI can't be handled 
as something like a magic number.  Maybe make the first line in the ebuild:
#EAPI=foo

ELF vs A.OUT don't use extensions to identify its files - the original 
file format was designed to allow file identification from the contents.

The only issue I can see with putting the EAPI on the first line is with 
legacy package managers.  That could be fixed in a number of ways.  The 
simplest would be just allowing it to break and sending out the fix well 
in advance of any breakage on GMN.  Considering the fiasco that we've 
had with some GCC/GLIBC upgrades and similar stuff in the past this 
would be pretty minor.  A less pretty solution might be a one-time file 
extension change.

There wouldn't be any need to repeat all of this every time the EAPI 
changes - at that point we've standardized the location of the EAPI 
within the file.
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