On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 4:03 PM, Donnie Berkholz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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.
We are not making them use this syntax; nothing stops them using the other one. -Alec > > -- > Thanks, > Donnie > > Donnie Berkholz > Developer, Gentoo Linux > Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com >
