I was goofing around trying to get current dev-vcs/git-9999 building by skipping the CVS patch ( which is applied with epatch ) and I had a bizzare amount of time working out how to get it working.
Looking at the source of eutils.eclass ' # Let people filter things dynamically ' suggests to me that this field is for use by a end user via package.env and friends. However, every time I ran emerge, the 'environment' file simply suggests that EPATCH_EXCLUDE was ="" . Looking elsewhere in eutils.eclass, I spied a forced initialization of EPATCH_EXCLUDE, which implicitly means you can't actually use this to exclude patches outside .ebuild Commenting this line out, yielded the result I had been expecting, the CVS patch being skipped . I only thought I could do this because I used something like this once upon a time with net-im/psi-9999 and thought it was just "normal" to be able to disable patches if I really wanted to. ( But I see now they acheive this by copying MY_EPATCH_EXCLUDE to EPATCH_EXCLUDE in the .ebuild ). So, is this variable guarded against user tampering intentionally? It sure beats hacking the ebuild. ( Side note, what would also be nice is some sort of warning if things you set in package.env are getting totally ignored. But thats a hard problem ) -- Kent perl -e "print substr( \"edrgmaM SPA NOcomil.ic\\@tfrken\", \$_ * 3, 3 ) for ( 9,8,0,7,1,6,5,4,3,2 );" http://kent-fredric.fox.geek.nz
