[gentoo-dev] Replacing einfo with elog

[Marius Mauch]

For the impatient reader:
Ebuilds should stop using einfo() for important messages and use elog()
instead.

Rationale:
I assume most of you are already aware of the new elog framework in
portage-2.1 for handling ebuild messages (like sending them by
mail/syslog or just storing them for later review).
This works very well, except that currently if you enable einfo logging
the user will be swamped with many status messages ("updating
foo", "removing bar") that might be interesting when you watch the build
output but are rather useless once the build is done.
To avoid this information overflow einfo messages aren't logged in the
default portage config, but that means that right now users will only
see ewarn and eerror messages and miss some einfos that might be
important.
To fix this problem a new function elog() was added in portage-2.1 to
close the gap between einfo and ewarn. THe reason this wasn't advertised
until now is that it couldn't be used in the tree as the function didn't
exist for people still on portage-2.0. A few minutes ago I committed the
attached patch to base/profile.bashrc so this is no longer an issue
(for 2.0 users elog is merely an alias to einfo). So from now on please
use elog() for any messages the user should read and use einfo() only
for status/progress messages that have no use once the build is
completed.

I'll get the relevant docs updated in the next days.

Marius

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