Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: EAPI usage

[Brian Harring]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 03:49:43PM +0100, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Aug 2012 23:58:00 +0000 (UTC)
> Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@×××.net> wrote:
> > Of course an individual PM could choose to keep support for as long
> > as they want, but unless I'm missing something, that'd let PMs drop
> > support for old EAPIs if desired, with at least a reasonably sane
> > upgrade path for both PM devs and users.
>
> It's irrelevant: the amount of package mangler code to be saved by
> removing old EAPIs is so small it's not worth discussing. Most EAPI
> changes so far have either been additions or very simple behaviour
> tweaks, not removals of annoying things.

Just seconding this statement; no PM author has stated "maintaining 
EAPIs is an undue burden"- it's come everytime from folks who don't 
/actually do any PM code/.

So please stop telling us what is, and isn't a burden in our code. :)


> There are things we might change in future EAPIs that will in the very
> long term make this discussion worthwhile. If we get rid of VDB access
> or unconstrained env saving, *then* it might be worth having this
> discussion.

Realistically even then, that's just swivelling vars/functions exposed 
to the ebuild env- it would require the vast majority of ebuilds 
migrating to EAPI versions that hide VDB access for this to be worth 
discussing (else due to backwards compat, it's a pointless 
discussion).


Either way, there's no reason to require devs use the latest EAPI; 
they migrate at their own pace as they need to, which is fine.  Case 
in point, check gentoo-x86 eapi usage:

repository '/var/db/repos/gentoo':
  eapi: '4' 13523 pkgs found, 42.58% of the repository
  eapi: '0' 8171 pkgs found, 25.73% of the repository
  eapi: '2' 5246 pkgs found, 16.52% of the repository
  eapi: '3' 4297 pkgs found, 13.53% of the repository
  eapi: '1' 520 pkgs found, 1.64% of the repository

0 is still in heavy usage since a lot of ebuilds don't need the newer 
EAPI functionality; 1 is mostly dead since the only gain of it (in 
comparison to 0) was slot deps, 2 had used use deps thus those same 
folk migrated to 2 (since if you need slot deps, it's semi likely you 
need use deps).

As for 3... that was prefix and xz support.  No reason to use it in 
comparison to 4 frankly.

Personally, I don't have any problems if gentoo were to mandate that 
EAPI1 shouldn't be used for new ebuilds in gentoo-x86, eapi2 instead.  
That sort of standard would make sense.

~harring