On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 12:08 PM, Matt Turner <matts...@gentoo.org> wrote: > eclasses are pretty great for sharing code akin to a library, but when > *all* of your ebuild's logic is in the eclass, well, that's not really > the intended use case as far as I can tell.
It works well in cases like KDE where you have 300 ebuilds that all just set a few environment variables and then genuinely share common code for everything else. Also, major updates only come once every few years, which helps keep the eclass from becoming a rat's nest. I think it is better to just version an eclass instead of having a mess of conditionals based on version, but then we'd have 300 revisions of toolchain.eclass (which is probably a good hint that we're doing it wrong). A library is a good analogy of how to avoid all of this. Each function does one thing well, and you call them as you need them, and you don't tweak their APIs 10 times per year. And if you find you're never using a function more than once after doing this, then you don't need a library in the first place. -- Rich
