I have a very quick proposal: why don't we move the packages' homepage
in metadata.xml (since it's usually unique for all the versions) and we
get rid of the variable for the next EAPI version?

This makes it easier to get the package's homepage for submitting bugs
upstream (you just do a single lookup for the metadata.xml file rather
than checking the ebuild; ensures that homepage changes don't get stale
for old revisions, avoids commits on old ebuilds for home page changes
(and thus changes that propagates on mirrors, and so on. It also makes
searching by homepage easier (a search program would take much less time
to parse XML that an ebuild).

I would propose an implementation of this that takes in consideration
also older proposals of having a way to specify upstream and
gentoo-specific information, something among the lines of this:

<link type="homepage">http://package.foobar.com</link>
<link type="bugtracker">http://package.foobar.com/bugs</link>

and for gentoo-specific

<link type="gentoo:devel" title="foobar maintainer's
guide">http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/foo/foobar</link>

<link
type="gentoo:user" title="foobar usage
guide">http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/foobar.xml</link>

Please submit all comments, as long as they are not "I don't like XML"
or "XML is the wrong answer" and similar since the point here is not to
discuss the format of metadata but rather where to have it.

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
http://blog.flameeyes.eu/