>>>>> On Mon, 18 May 2020, William Hubbs wrote:

> I have been acting as a backup maintainer for dev-vcs/cli. A pull
> request was opened today that changes the way we detect whether the
> ebuild is live from looking for "live" in $PROPERTIES to the version
> number [1].

> A different dev referred me to PMS which indicates that ebuilds should
> not rely on $PROPERTIES for anything [2].

PMS says that ebuilds may not rely on any package manager support for
PROPERTIES. That doesn't prevent them (or eclasses) from assigning
tokens to it, and of course it is perfectly legal to check for such
tokens later in the ebuild.

That said, current practice is to check for 9999 in PV. Maybe ebuilds
could check for "live" in PROPERTIES instead, but presumably that should
be discussed in gentoo-dev first and made a general policy if it would
be accepted.

> I see quite a few ebuilds in the tree checking $FEATURES however,
> which imo is even less reliable since $FEATURES is not specified
> anywhere in pms and the $FEATURES variable is portage-specific.

> I guess I'm looking for consistency. If we are going to allow
> $FEATURES to be checked, should we allow $PROPERTIES to be checked?
> Or, should we ban checking both of them?

> IMO if we allow $FEATURES to be checked, we really should reword PMS
> to not say anything about $PROPERTIES other than to define the tokens
> it can contain.

In my understanding, ebuilds really shouldn't check FEATURES. If they do
it nevertheless (sometime there's no other way), then there should be a
non-catastrophic fallback.

Ulrich

> [1] https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/15851
> [2] https://dev.gentoo.org/~ulm/pms/head/pms.html#x1-670007.3.5

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