Re: [gentoo-dev] Glep 23 and glep 5

[Thomas de Grenier de Latour]

On Thu, 18 Mar 2004 20:46:29 +0100
Olivier Crête <tester@g.o> wrote:

> I just re-read glep 5 and I noticed a problem with it. It proposes
> moving the licensing information to metadata.xml.

I've just read glep 5, and i'm a bit sceptical about it.  I'm not a
dev so i currently don't have to touch metadata.xml, but only ebuilds
(quick bump in my overlays, sometimes writing new ones, etc.), and i
like it this way.  But if this glep gets accepted, i will have to write
a metadata.xml for every new package i do, and i don't really understand
why.  I think that, despite it "simplify the ebuild format", it would
complicates the overall process of writing new packages (two different
syntax, two skeletons, etc.), of sharing them beetween users, of
submitting them to bugzilla (expect many submissions with missing
metadatas), etc.  That's all very minor issues, but still annoyances. 
Declaring the bash way three variables in an already opened file is
already the simplest thing i can think of, and writing them in a
separate xml file is not.

I have the fealing that the motivation is a bit theoretical: avoiding 
redundancy because it is a well known ugly/bad thing.  If it is the
case, i don't really agree, this should not be a goal by itself. 
Redundancy is bad when it makes things harder to maintain, or when it
implies tricky code to ensure coherence, etc. But here, there is no such
issue:
 - on maintenance side, there is no difference ; when you have a
new version to write you start with a copy of the previous one, so the
description/homepage/license are not additional work.
 - and on the code side, as Marius explained, it would complicates
things.

So what did i miss something that would justify this changes?

Thanks,

-- 
TGL.

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