On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 10:03 PM, Brian Harring <ferri...@gmail.com> wrote: > Pragmatic reality, the eapi function actually would work fine. As > pointed out elsewhere, bash parses as it goes- which isn't going to > change.
Unless the ebuild isn't written in bash... How do you source the ebuild if you don't know what to use to source it? How do you know what to use to source it if you don't know the EAPI? Right now all the existing EAPIs use bash, but there is no reason the file couldn't be xml, or python, or just about anything else. If we want to allow for that kind of flexibility, then it might make sense to go ahead and state that our convention is to stick EAPI=5 in one of the first few lines of the ebuild, or inside a comment, but also go a step further and state that the text "EAPI=" cannot appear elsewhere in the ebuild (or perhaps within the first 10 lines). Just about any file format we might use would allow us to make "EAPI=" appear in it, but not all could guarantee that it would occur at the start of a line, or at the start of a line immediately after a #. In any case, I can really see the KISS value in a very rigid syntax that is trivial to parse. Stuff like this almost makes me wish our ebuilds already were xml files or such, with bash embedded inside sections. Finding a particular tag in an xml file is trivial as the fundamentals haven't changed in 15 years. Rich
