Bernd Steinhauser wrote:
> And that is, what this is about, making EAPI bumps as less painful as
> possible. The filename is the easiest solution for that.
In any design, there are "easy" short-cuts that can be taken. But
sometimes these short-cuts break paradigms that are fundamental. If you
wanted, you could throw a bunch of things into the filename and make it
255 characters long to avoid reading the file, but that clearly would be
a pretty bad design.
> I really fail to see the point, why it is so important, that the
> extension will still be .ebuild in the future.
>
> There is a lot of software, that keeps using the same filename for
> different versions of stuff and in many cases, that is a huge mess.
Is the "huge mess" you are thinking of the basic reality that software
of any reasonable complexity needs to deal with file formats evolving?
If so, that is exactly why EAPIs now are being introduced.
But almost all software deals with this transparently - no need to
expose it to the user, and sticking the version in the filename is both
fragile (renaming the file can alter it) and seems like a hack.
> I still haven't seen any good reasons against it.
I realize that there are two camps of people here. One camp sees
mangling the filename extension as an undesirable way to deal with this,
and the other camp simply sees no problem with this.
I want to point out, however, that the fact that you do not see the
issue does not make the issue invalid. I am sure there are people who
work at Apple who care nothing about the way an iPhone looks or feels
and only care that it works correctly. If that person went to Steve
Jobs and said, "Why are you spending so much money to make this thing
look cool?", he would say that Apple is known for making cool things,
and no one would buy something that works great but looks like a piece
of junk. He'd be right.
I realize this analogy is a bit of an exaggeration, but there is no
reason we cannot make EAPIs work correctly and very efficiently (this is
where technical innovation comes in), while also keeping the basic
interface (and I include file name convention here) clean, standard,
uncluttered, uncomplicated, and elegant.
-Joe
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