Many of the standard ebuild variables contain lists of items, and those could be specified as bash arrays instead of quoted strings. Those could be *DEPEND especially. Sometimes one likes to add a comment about a particular dependency listed there, and bash arrays would allow doing that nicely. For example: DEPEND="${RDEPEND} dev-foo/bar >=dev-bar/foo-4" # bar DEP needed because of configure bug (#nnnnn) # although upstream states foo-3 is enough, baz-7 forces using foo-4 Could be expressed as: DEPEND=( ${RDEPEND[@]} # configure bug (#nnnnn) dev-foo/bar # although upstream states foo-3 is enough, baz-7 forces using foo-4 >=dev-bar/foo-4 )
Thinking about it more, it will probably be a good idea to introduce alternate grouping character with this since () has to be escaped in bash arrays; for example {}.
Are you still pursuing this?
