I debated where to post this, but the topic is fairly dev-oriented and has big long-term impact so I landed here. This really isn't organizational in nature.
During the council meeting there was a bit of a philosophical debate over the proper role of EAPI vs implementing functions in eclasses. I felt that it was important enough to at least get more community input before we continue voting on features like user patching/etc which tend to favor an EAPI-based approach. I'll try to fairly frame the arguments, though I personally lean in the EAPI direction and I'll leave it to somebody else to fix my straw man. The Eclass argument goes like this: Eclasses already work in every PM. Half of what we're debating is already in eutils. Why move this code into the PM, where it has to be re-implemented everywhere? If anything we should be moving more PM functionality out and into eclasses where we can have competing implementations and more flexibility. The EAPI argument goes like this: Sure, you can have 14 different implementations of epatch which lets each maintainer use the one that makes the most sense. However, who wants to edit an ebuild which uses a "bad" epatch implementation and re-learn how to add a patch? Adding patches is a common thing, so why not have a standard way to do it? We can still have eclasses for one-offs. And how can you ever do something like user patches when they will only work if the maintainer cares to support them? I view this as not being unlike dealing with programs that encourage the use of Turing-complete configuration files. Sure, they give you a lot more power, but that power comes at a cost. Sendmail config files are a running joke, and if you want to control the niceness or ioniceness of an OpenRC service then you're going to have to read the script and possibly patch it. When there is no value in everybody doing things differently, why not just do them the same way? Besides, I think user-patches are a GREAT feature to have, and one I use all the time (without even thinking about it if a package with a patch gets rebuilt). As I said in the meeting, if we were selling Gentoo to make money, it would be the sort of feature that you'd advertise. Why make it hard to use such a distinctive advantage of a source-based distro? Since this month is the last one for this Council term as an added bonus you stack the next Council with folks who agree with you on this one... :) Rich
