On 27 May 2016 at 10:28, rindeal <dev.rind...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 1) what are they? > 2) why are they used?
My best explanation is its a way to re-use very large amounts of code between 2 ebuilds, without resorting to: a) Copying the whole ebuild and hoping you find the relevant part in diffs b) Not needing reams of version-specific conditional code to make copying ebuilds between versions easier. c) Not needing confusing eclasses that exist to serve a single package, loaded with lots of weird conditional logic. My understanding is you could effectively roll the eblits back into the ebuild statically, just doing so would make keeping the changes consistent harder. Its clearly designed for a system where you have ~10 different versions of Perl available or ~10 different versions of glibc available, but you don't want to pay the price of duplicating that logic wholesale for every minor concurrent revision, and only want to update essential differences when you need to, not because you have to. That said, its a very confusing system to get your head around, because its *basically* yet another "mixin" system like "inherit", but done in bash, which itself is a rather strange language to be doing something as complicated as mixins. -- Kent KENTNL - https://metacpan.org/author/KENTNL
