Now that EAPI 6 is Council-approved and pretty close to being deployed, I think it’s about time to write up a not-so-short guide to it. It’s especially important that EAPI 6 is a bit different from the previous EAPIs. It was not only seen as an opportunity to add new features but also to tidy things up a bit and improve strictness.
If you look into the PMS, you’d see that we’d not only added completely new stuff but also ported a few common eclass functions, in a little cleaner form, and new useful phase functions. Furthermore, we used EAPI 6 as an opportunity to finally increase strictness of Portage in regard to PMS, and ban some long-unwanted eclasses.
Therefore, I’d like to ask you — please don’t go hooray-enabling EAPI 6 support in your ebuilds and eclasses. Take a while to think, and do things right. Please think of EAPI 6 as a lifetime opportunity of improving your eclass APIs, as we improved the API provided by Package Managers.
Now, time for a little summary of changes, their implications and a bit of rationale.