> This can also be accomplish by a shared dependency package so is there a > particular benefit for extending EAPI to support this?
If you look at it from a Gentoo-only perspecitve, there's probably no benefit. But it would allow Gentoo to work together nicely with RubyGems. So (apart from feasability) the question is: What's Gentoo's approach towards other lib managers such as RubyGems? (1) All gems should be installed from ebuilds only. (2) If an ebuild requires a gem, it has to be installed from the corresponding ebuild. For all other gems, Gentoo leaves the choice to the user and tries to work together as well as possible with RubyGems. Currently, reality is closer to (2) and I honestly don't believe it makes much sense to build the infrastructure to convert all gems to ebuilds automatically and timely enough for (1) to come true. If the delay were only hours, Ruby devs would rather use the RubyGems manager than waiting for the ebuild to appear. -sven
