Re: [gentoo-dev] My wishlist for EAPI 5

[Ben de Groot]

On 21 June 2012 05:33, Alec Warner <antarus@g.o> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 10:25 PM, Richard Yao <ryao@g.o> wrote:
>> Here is my wishlist for EAPI 5:
[...]
>> POSIX Shell compliance
>>        There has been a great deal of work done to give the user full control
>> of what is on his system and there is more that we can do there. In
>> particular, I think a lean Gentoo Linux system should be able to use
>> busybox sh and nothing else. That requires POSIX shell compliance.
>> OpenRC init scripts support this and the configure scripts support this.
>> The few exceptions are bugs that are addressed by the Gentoo BSD developers.
>>        As such, I think we should make EAPI=5 use POSIX shell by default. If
>> an ebuild requires bash, we can allow the ebuild to declare that (e.g.
>> WANT_SH=bash), but that should be the exception and not the rule.
>>
>
> Our ebuilds are written in bash. [...] Screw
> trying to get the PM to stop using bash; developers are not interested
> in writing ebuilds in posix shell; bar none.
>
> Why would I as an ebuild author waste a bunch of time writing my
> ebuild in posix compatible sh when I can use bash (and if I had a
> better language than bash to write ebuilds in; I'd use that too.) You
> are free to write your ebuilds in posix sh; good luck to you.

Ebuilds are written in bash. And the convenience of using bash
far outweighs any benefits of using posix sh instead. One needs
to make a very strong case to convince enough developers to
change this...

-- 
Cheers,

Ben | yngwin
Gentoo developer
Gentoo Qt project lead