Hi all, The Prefix team has a separate Portage branch which implements the "prefix" extensions. In short, this encompasses the addition of the variables EPREFIX, ED and EROOT, and the function eprefixify to the ebuild/eclass environment, which may be used to make an ebuild work for a given prefix offset.
I would like to get some input on how best to deal with these additions in the light of EAPI and the main (gentoo-x86) tree and Portage. Since the Prefix extensions can currently be applied on top of any existing EAPI, they are not requiring any special EAPI value as baseline. Currently in Prefix we implemented EAPI as being a set of tokens that are orthogonal to each other. In other words, while 0, 1 and 2 are mutual exclusive, "prefix" can be applied to 0, 1, or 2. The result is something like EAPI="prefix 1". Of course with this approach the recent introduction of EAPI=2, resulted in a problem with eclasses that do a blind check on the EAPI variable to be e.g. 2. An alternative is to create multiple new EAPIs, such as prefix-1 or 1-prefix, containing the Prefix extensions on top of EAPI=1. Same problem when checks on EAPI are done of course, but EAPI then always consists of a single value. Something that was raised in previous discussions was that maybe the Prefix extensions don't need an EAPI in itself, but that an ebuild has to be marked as Prefix-ready through e.g. the recently proposed PROPERTIES variable, (a horrible hack) in KEYWORDS, or a newly to be added variable. Please discuss. -- Fabian Groffen Gentoo on a different level
