On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 6:12 AM, Kent Fredric <kentfred...@gmail.com> wrote: > > There's the obvious case of compiled-binaries where that might not be > possible, but thats definately strawman stuff and I wouldn't support > that sort of nonsense anyway. Compiled binaries for ebuilds can gtfo. >
Why do I feel like a similar debate must have happened on some list back when the SMTP message terminator was worked out? The problem is that we're running into is the use of in-band control information. An advantage of sticking the EAPI in the filename is that it is completely out-of-band. Other options like an external file or POSIX attributes have the same advantage (with the disadvantage that they are harder to keep in-sync or support in general). If you want to stick the EAPI inside the file then we have to go with one of two routes: 1. Make the file directly interpret-able by some existing tool like bash, xml parsers, or (gtfo) ld-linux.so. This requires making the EAPI in-band info, and thus if the file format changes there is risk that any existing code that interprets EAPIs could break, to the degree that we weren't infinitely clever in designing the spec. 2. Make the file require pre-processing before being fed to another interpreter. This breaks syntax-highlighting and such, and is generally more of a pita. However, this allows in-file EAPI info to remain out-of-band. An ebuild might be an xml file with EAPI and other meta-data, and might contain sections that get ripped out and handed over to bash, python, or ld-linux.so to the extent that you want to be told to gtfo. In my thinking the option with the fewest drawbacks and the greatest extent of future-proofing is to go with GLEP 55 and stick it in the filename. Every filesystem and rsync tool handles filenames, they're impossible to separate from file contents, and every interpreter out there ignores them. If we don't want to stick it in the filename then either we have to decide that whatever we come up with could break, or that we really have to change what ebuilds look like. Rich
