Mike Frysinger wrote:
> as mentioned, GNU is the main bread and butter of Gentoo. forcing the
> majority of people to go pure POSIX in the face of GNU extensions that make
> life easier is wrong. so the minority gets screwed, that's life. especially
> considering it's trivial for the minority to conform.
> -mike
Hi Mike,
I totally agree that we should be careful about trying to force pure
POSIX on ebuild writers, and you are right that GNU is the majority. I
do see an issue here, though, and I am not sure what the best solution is.
Ebuilds have to work across various platforms, including the Gentoo/Alt
ones, and it is common practice to use external tools (like "find",
etc.), and unlike eclasses, they can behave differently on different
platforms (at least the way things are set up now). Ebuilds already
have to limit themselves to using tools from a core set that exist on
all systems, of course, but if options to these tools are used that do
not exist on all platforms, the ebuild is not portable, and that's the
crux of the issue.
So there are a couple of options, as I see it:
1) Limit tool options to those that are common to all tool variants
2) Port a standard (i.e. GNU) set of tools to all platforms
3) Force all gentoo ports to use GNU userland
I think we'd all agree that #3 is too restrictive. For example, g/fbsd
uses BSD's userland (like vanilla FreeBSD does), and making it GNU would
be a pretty major change. #2 is would be feasible, but namespace
collisions would result unless we did something like prepend "g" to the
tools and perhaps place them in a standard dir where ebuilds will look
for them first. This would even more formally define the core set of
tools allowed, and I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing. #1 is
the one you object to, and I am torn on this one. I agree with you that
we don't necessarily want to deny ebuilds nice features included in only
the GNU variants, but then again, the Gentoo Development Guide does
recommend avoiding GNU-specific options for, I assume, this reason:
http://devmanual.gentoo.org/tools-reference/find/index.html
So, comments?
-Joe
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