[gentoo-dev] Yet another proposal for ebuild extensions

[Ravi Pinjala]

There's been a lot of noise on this list the past few days about GLEP
55, but precious few solutions actually proposed. Changing the file
extension would certainly be useful for some changes, but the success of
EAPIs >0 which are already in the tree demonstrates that for many
changes, altering the filename is unnecessary. Anything with a .ebuild
extension will have to be parsable by bash according to some set of
rules, for various reasons, so anything more exotic will require a file
extension change. On the other hand, all current ebuilds *do* happen to
parse just fine in bash, so there's no pressing need to change the
extension for current packages.

Instead of changing rules for existing ebuilds, then, why not formalize
some guidelines for non-ebuild-compatible packages in the tree, separate
from EAPIs? Allowing new package formats is the next logical
generalization after considering new and incompatible ebuild formats,
and it would probably be cleaner overall, while giving people the
freedom to experiment with whatever wild ideas they have for packages.

People are going to end up trying out new formats; just look at
kdebuild-1. Rather than trying to put a lid on that sort of thing, and
forcing every Gentoo package to be ebuild-compatible, there should be
some kind of standard for how to treat new package formats, so that
ground rules can be laid out. For instance, the whole thing will fall
apart quickly if there aren't rules about dependencies between packages
of different formats, and there are probably a lot of other issues that
I haven't thought of - all the more reason for standards to be laid out.

--Ravi