Re: [gentoo-dev] RFD : .ebuild is only bash

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 2:29 AM, Richard Yao <ryao@×××××××××××××.edu> wrote:
> To make XML a viable substitute for bash, you will need to implement a
> turing complete language in XML, which should probably preclude its use
> in ebuilds. You would  likely have better luck with a functional
> programming language, although you are more than welcome to demonstrate
> otherwise.

Well, a trivial solution to that is to embed bash code (or some other
language) into the content of the xml file.  As I and others posted
earlier the advantage is that it makes all the key/value stuff easier
to manage than doing it in bash, but it makes editing the scripting
content harder and requires pre-processing before being fed into an
interpreter.

If you look at metadata.xml you could argue that we're already using
xml-based ebuilds to an extent, but we split the metadata across two
different files in different formats and call them different things.

In any case, my point in bringing up xml was that the whole point of
GLEP 55 was to future-proof the interpretation of ebuild files, and
xml is just one example of what the future could conceivably look
like.

Rich