Hi, everyone.
The Council has eventually decided that the proposed agenda item
changing the EAPI workflow has not received sufficient public
discussion, so I'd like to restart it.
The point of contention was a proposed change to the EAPI depreciation
workflow. The current workflow consists of roughly three steps:
1. The Council decides to deprecate an EAPI. It is added to eapis-
deprecated in layout.conf and pkgcheck/repoman start emitting warnings
when they're used in ebuilds. This is a 'weak' request for developers
to stop using the old EAPI.
2. The Council decides to ban an EAPI. This is a pure policy decision
with no technical implementation. It is a 'strong' request not to use
the old EAPI, and developers have to have a very good reason (e.g.
blocked secbump, revbump due to dep changes by a third party and so on)
to touch an ebuild and leave it at old EAPI.
3. When all ebuilds are removed, the EAPI is added to eapis-banned
and the tools now explicitly forbid adding ebuilds with that EAPI.
The change proposed in [1] eliminates step 2. The EAPI remains
in 'deprecated' policy-state until all ebuilds using it are removed.
There is no distinction between 'weak' deprecation ("please don't use
it") and 'strong' ban ("you mustn't use it unless you have a very good
reason to").
My gut feeling is that having this distinction is useful. However, it
has been pointed out that we've probably never really had to use it
(i.e. use the "banned" argument to stop someone from using old EAPI)
and that the switch from "deprecated" to "banned" state did not really
affect porting away from old EAPI.
dilfridge's EAPI plots [2] can be helpful in verifying this claim,
combined with deprecation and ban dates found on the PMS project page
[3].
This decision will also affect another posted agenda item, namely
banning EAPI 5. Switching to the new workflow will eliminate that step,
and therefore EAPI 5 won't be "banned" until all EAPI 5 ebuilds are
removed.
WDYT?
[1]
https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/4a504a0b7aa9199bac3ebcaf54064841
[2] https://www.akhuettel.de/~huettel/plots/eapi.php
[3]
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Package_Manager_Specification#Council_approval_and_use_in_Gentoo_repository
--
Best regards,
Michał Górny
