There's been a lot of noise on this list the past few days about GLEP 55, but precious few solutions actually proposed. Changing the file extension would certainly be useful for some changes, but the success of EAPIs >0 which are already in the tree demonstrates that for many changes, altering the filename is unnecessary. Anything with a .ebuild extension will have to be parsable by bash according to some set of rules, for various reasons, so anything more exotic will require a file extension change. On the other hand, all current ebuilds *do* happen to parse just fine in bash, so there's no pressing need to change the extension for current packages.
Instead of changing rules for existing ebuilds, then, why not formalize some guidelines for non-ebuild-compatible packages in the tree, separate from EAPIs? Allowing new package formats is the next logical generalization after considering new and incompatible ebuild formats, and it would probably be cleaner overall, while giving people the freedom to experiment with whatever wild ideas they have for packages. People are going to end up trying out new formats; just look at kdebuild-1. Rather than trying to put a lid on that sort of thing, and forcing every Gentoo package to be ebuild-compatible, there should be some kind of standard for how to treat new package formats, so that ground rules can be laid out. For instance, the whole thing will fall apart quickly if there aren't rules about dependencies between packages of different formats, and there are probably a lot of other issues that I haven't thought of - all the more reason for standards to be laid out. --Ravi
