On 23:13 Mon 08 Sep , Ciaran McCreesh wrote: > On Mon, 8 Sep 2008 14:33:50 -0700 > Donnie Berkholz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On 12:46 Sun 07 Sep , Marcus D. Hanwell wrote: > > > I personally agree with several others who have replied to this > > > thread. The reduction in lines of code/characters seems to > > > introduce an uglier syntax which is harder to read with > > > questionable benefits. > > > > One of the great things about ebuilds is that they're very natural to > > write in most cases, if you can manage to build the program by hand. > > Raising this barrier of entry for questionable benefit seems like a > > bad idea. We don't need to make it any harder to begin contributing > > to Gentoo. > > So why are we making people know the exact ins and outs of > reimplementing default functions, complete with knowledge of whether or > not to use die, when all they need in most cases is to set a simple > variable instead?
This series of variables and syntaxes within them doesn't seem much simpler than functions. From what I understand, it also conflates multiple concepts into a single variable name (the function name, whether it's USE-dependent, and how the configure flag is passed). > What proportion of people do you think know whether or not you need a > die with econf or emake? How many user-written ebuilds out there > correctly install the right docs and don't try to install docs that > don't exist, deal with install parallelisation correctly and handle > error cases properly? You're right, following all of the policy takes work. What I'm talking about is an entry-level ebuild hack that just gets people in the door and is the reason a lot of people love Gentoo. -- Thanks, Donnie Donnie Berkholz Developer, Gentoo Linux Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com
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