Re: [gentoo-dev] Proposed future EAPI feature: FILES whitelist

[Michał Górny]

On Sat, 17 Sep 2016 00:30:31 +1200
Kent Fredric <kentnl@g.o> wrote:

> Just an idea that seemed obvious enough and obviously missing.

Sounds like a great way to discourage people from contributing even
further. I'm going to say that developers leaving mess in their
FILESDIR is rather a pathological case, so why does everyone need to
suffer for their carelessness?

And even then, stale files are a minor nuisance compared to the cost of
maintaining redundant list of all files. Not to mention that the size
of the lists will easily exceed size of the stale patches.

Then, some eclasses access FILESDIR directly, and do magic if some
files exist in there. Not saying it's anywhere close to sanity -- just
that people do it.

Finally, the same though occurred to me as to ulm. People will forget
to update the variable. They will forget to update it when adding,
and they will waste their time on build that is going to fail somewhere
at doinit in the end -- how nice is that? Then, they will forget to
update it when removing and the file will be kept stale.

Any solution you can try to invent to solve those problems, or make
the system any more friendly, is actually making it more complex,
harder to comprehend and even more costly.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny
<http://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/>