Re: [gentoo-user] dev-python/isodate breaks my emerge because it's at EAPI?

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Aug 6, 2021 at 8:37 AM n952162 <n952162@×××.de> wrote:
>
> I was complaining, mostly, that isodate had to be the thing that was
> incompatible with my configuration.  Maybe there is a unavoidable reason
> that that package had to move to the newest EAPI, or maybe it was just a
> sense that it's cool to be with the cutting edge.  It seems to me that
> isodate (which is actually tied, perhaps indirectly, to clearly slow
> United Nations rule-making) must be pretty stable.
>

it is generally encouraged that packages use the latest EAPI - there
are a lot of reasons for doing so.  The main ones that get held back
are packages that would interfere with updating portage and the
toolchain, since those are what are most needed when somebody does an
update.

All you need to do in order to resolve an incompatible EAPI issue is
update portage.  We don't really provide support for running
out-of-date versions of portage itself.  There really isn't much
reason to run an old version of portage - it is unlikely that updating
portage is going to cause incompatibilities on your system as almost
nothing uses portage except the distribution itself.

It might not hurt if that error message included the suggestion to run
"emerge -u portage" to update it. It does say that the solution is to
update portage - it just doesn't explicitly tell you how to do so.

>
> Those distros are not source distros.  I'm making an argument that
> there's a large space between binary distributions and source
> distributions that pass every upstream change down in realtime. Gentoo
> is in the best position to service that space
>

There may be a nice for a release-based source-based distribution, and
nothing is stopping anybody from adding releases to Gentoo (a trivial
way to do this would be to just fork the repository and update it in
releases).  I just don't think there is THAT much interest among the
community in doing so, and even if such a thing were created I'm
pretty skeptical that they wouldn't at least keep portage and the
EAPIs cutting-edge, as it doesn't really hurt anything to do so.

If you want to kick something like that off though feel free.  All you
need to do is clone the Gentoo repository, and use some
branches/tags/etc to manage it.  You could pull in whatever you want
in whatever branch you want, and curate releases.  Really the only
hard part would be the curation and QA.  If you wanted somebody to run
the CI tools against your repo and file bugs for you I wouldn't be
surprised if infra was willing to do so.  It would still be a fair bit
of work, and I'm really skeptical that it would get much use.

To address your follow-up email, many popular binary distros have been
working on reproducible builds, so if your main concern is fear of
what might be bundled inside packages, I'd think that would mitigate a
lot of it.

-- 
Rich