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

[Pacho Ramos]

El jue, 21-06-2012 a las 08:39 +0100, Ciaran McCreesh escribió:
> On Thu, 21 Jun 2012 09:25:10 +0200
> Pacho Ramos <pacho@g.o> wrote:
> > Then, looks clear to me that the way to get things approved in newer
> > EAPIs is not clear enough as looks like a lot of devs (like me) don't
> > know them (for example, when things to be added to EAPI need also a
> > GLEP and a PMS diff, also the needing to get an implementation for any
> > package manager).
>
> That's very much a judgement call. If a feature is "easy", low impact
> and uncontroversial, you can ask for it on IRC, the mailing lists or
> bugzilla, and chances are someone will do all the work for you.

That cannot be the way of doing things, who is the once deciding a
feature is "easy"? Is something like:
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=357561

easy enough? Looks like it's getting so much time to get it done that we
are now needing to rely on eclasses and manual removal to handle it.

>  If it's
> a big feature with broad impact requiring lots of changes, you need to
> do however much work is necessary such that a) the people working on
> PMS understand it well enough to document it, b) developers understand
> it well enough to know what it involves for them, c) the Council can
> compare and contrast it with other proposals, and d) it can be
> implemented.
>
> The "implement it in a package manager" thing is because of what
> happened with REQUIRED_USE. It hadn't been implemented previously, and
> as it turns out it has some fairly hefty usability issues.

Look for example to multilib stuff, looks like mails explaining the
issue and how tommy wants to fix it are not enough (I don't mean only
the last thread about this problem,  I remember he sending more mails
explaining the issue months ago), Tommy is also providing PMS people an
implementation... and now you come demanding more and more things. If
all requirements would be clear from start, this shouldn't occur and all
of us would save a lot of time and problems between us.

>
> > > > I also don't understand why Gentoo is forced to stick with old
> > > > ways of doing things until new EAPI is approved
> > >
> > > That's not what's going on here. The issue is that there might be
> > > one person who understands what "the new way of doing things", but
> > > he hasn't told us what he thinks that is. Once we get a proper
> > > explanation, getting an EAPI out doesn't take long.
> > >
> >
> > But you must confess that old problems like multilib support, force
> > package rebuilding or optional dep support are still pending while
> > still needing and, the problem with the way things are discussed now
> > is that some day anybody arises the problem again, other one demands
> > more things to be provided, a discussion starts, the problem gets
> > stalled... one year later the same problem arises again. There is
> > clearly a lack of information to the rest of developers about how to
> > propose anything to get accepted for next EAPI.
>
> The reason those are still pending is because no-one knows what the
> *problem* is, let alone the solution.

Seriously, don't you know what are the problems of current way of
handling emul packages? :O

>  That's not an EAPI issue, it's a
> developers saying "I want a flying unicorn!" issue.
>
> > Then, you accept exherbo is not forced to *only* follow EAPI while you
> > force Gentoo and portage to only support features approved in an EAPI?
>
> I think you have a severe misunderstanding of what the EAPI process is
> about here... It's not about forcing anything. The point of the EAPI
> process is to allow Gentoo to roll things out without requiring
> developers to rewrite all their ebuilds every few months (which
> happens on Exherbo, incidentally), and without breaking user systems.
>

Then, I guess we could have something like GEAPI that would require only
agreement between gentoo people (and people wanting to reach a
consensus) that would also prevent people from needing to rewrite their
ebuilds from time to time? 

Don't you see this way of handling things, with such and obscure way of
getting things accepted for every EAPI is really hurting us? If all of
us would want to reach consensus it wouldn't be so problematic but, when
some people is simply waiting every proposal (even with implementation
and after more tries to get it accepted) to ask them for more and more
work and, when anybody ask for help to accomplish that, the same one
refuses to help if he is not payed for that, this only causes Gentoo to
lack some important features for ages.