Re: [gentoo-project] Council meeting: Tuesday 11 September 2012, 19:00 UTC

[Michał Górny]

On Tue, 4 Sep 2012 12:16:04 +0200
Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o> wrote:

> 4. Open floor (10 minutes)

I would have one small conflict/issue to resolve if it fits the 'open
floor' time, or otherwise for the next meeting.

It is the inclusion of dointo() and newinto() functions into
eutils.eclass. The implementation of these functions would look like:

dointo() {
    (
        insinto "$1"
        doins "${@:2}"
    )
}

so it's simply insinto+*ins in a subshell to avoid altering the ebuild-
defined insinto target. This is how various eclasses implement
functions like domenu(), doicon()...

I wanted to add those functions to eutils.eclass so that the functions
defined other and other eclasses wouldn't have to repeat the same
code. However, Diego Petteno was strongly opposed to this and I wasn't
able to convince him so I'd like to put it to debate by the Council.

The alternative proposed by Diego is to include those helpers in EAPI
5. However, that would mean that the beneficial eclass functions will
have to use them conditionally to EAPI, so it wouldn't benefit at all
functions in eclasses supporting EAPI<5 (and the affected eclasses
have no reason to drop support for older EAPIs). Effectively,
if introduced in a future EAPI, the helpers will be not used at all for
a long time.

I would like to especially note that these functions are meant for
internal use by eclasses and not by ebuilds. Ebuilds can and should use
insinto directly which is more optimal; eclasses need the subshelling
to allow ebuilds to do things like:

    insinto /foo
    doins bar
    doicon bar.xpm
    doins something_else

Ebuilds obviously can control their use of insinto.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny