Mangling shell options in ebuilds

A long time ago eutils.eclass was gifted with a set of terribly ugly functions to push/pop various variables and shell options. Those functions were written very badly, and committed without any review. As a result, a number of eclasses and ebuilds are now using that code without even understanding how bad it is.

In this post, I would like to shortly summarize how to properly and reliably save states of shell options. While the resulting code is a little bit longer than use of e*_push and e*_pop functions, it is much more readable, does not abuse eval, does not abuse global variables and is more reliable.

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GLEP67, or how packages are going to be maintained

The way packages are maintained in Gentoo have been evolving for quite some time already. So far all of that has been happening on top of old file formats which slowly started to diverge from the needs of Gentoo developers, and become partially broken. The concept of herds has become blurry, with confusion in definition between different developers and partial assumption about their deprecation. Maintenance of herd by project has been broken by moving projects to the Wiki. Some projects have stopped using herds, others have been declaring them in metadata.xml in different ways.

The problem has finally reached the Gentoo Council and has been discussed on 2015-10-25 meeting (note: no summary still…). The Council attempted to address different problems by votes, and create a new solution by combining the results of votes. However, finally it decided that it is not possible to create a good specification this way. Instead, the meeting has brought two major points. Firstly, herds are definitely deprecated. Secondly, someone needs to provide a complete, consistent replacement in GLEP form.

This is how GLEP 67 came to be. It was based on results of previous discussion, Council votes and thorough analysis of different problems. It provides a complete, consistent system for maintaining packages and expressing the maintenance information. It has been approved by the Council on 2016-01-10, with two week deadline on preparing to the switch.

Therefore, on 2016-01-24 Gentoo is going to switch to the new maintenance structure described in GLEP 67 completely. The announcement with transition details has been sent already. Instead, I’d like to focus on describing how things are going to work starting from the day GLEP 67 becomes implemented.

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