Re: [gentoo-dev] [GLEP56] USE flag descriptions in metadata

[Doug Goldstein]

Marius Mauch wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:42:24 -0400
> Doug Goldstein <cardoe@g.o> wrote:
>
>
>> All,
>>
>> Here's a GLEP for the addition of USE flag descriptions to package
>> metadata. It does not address any future ideas that others may have
>> had or suggested. It merely gives developers the necessary "tools" to
>> document their USE flag usage it better detail on a per package basis.
>>
>> An clearly motivation explanation that I didn't add, which I'm going
>> to add once I send this is the fact that as per the QA Project,
>> use.local.desc can not contain a USE flag that already appears
>> globally in use.desc. This would allow a description for that USE
>> flag to be contained in the metadata.
>>
>> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0056.html
>>
>> I encourage any and all _technical_ feedback.
>>
>
> Doesn't include any statement about compability with existing tools or
> how it's related to use.local.desc (replacement, extension, ...)
>
> Marius
>
It purposefully does not. XML is an extensible language that allows for 
this type of expandability. Current tools should be able to validate 
that adding these tags are valid if they appear in the DTD. However, if 
those tools do not handle those tags they should not do anything with 
them, hence the nature of XML.

The replacement of use.local.desc would necessitate a change to any and 
all tools which use that file and require them to support the new XML 
data. This of course introduces a chicken/egg issue. I have mentioned to 
infra the possibility of having a pre-rsync process that condensed all 
metadata.xml's into a use.local.desc that would be part of rsync data 
but not part of CVS. This could be written as a CVS hook to see when a 
metadata.xml was touched and run the utility appropriately.

But again, this is outside the scope of this GLEP, whose purpose merely 
is to provide a way to document this.
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