Re: [gentoo-dev] Allow variable refs in HOMEPAGE

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Thu, 3 Aug 2017, Michael Orlitzky wrote:

> On 08/03/2017 06:33 PM, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
>> It did, even back in 2004:
>> https://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/devrel/handbook/hb-guide-ebuild.xml?hideattic=0&revision=1.10&view=markup#l534

> You got me, but now we can see where that text came from and it
> proves my original point that the last line was added as an
> afterthought and isn't any sort of policy:

>   https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=73272

Huh? We don't know if these changes result from a previous discussion,
or codify best practice at the time. Given that the comment says
"consolidate [...] into the Ebuild HOWTO" I would assume that they
don't appear out of the blue there.

Besides, something that sits in the handbook and devmanual uncontested
since more than a decade certainly is a policy.

> Which is good, because it's a silly rule, and hundreds of ebuilds in
> the tree wisely ignore it.

> Why single out HOMEPAGE? I might like to copy/paste the econf
> arguments, so should we forbid the use of $(use_enable foo) and
> force everyone to use "if" statements? Of course not; if you need
> the value of HOMEPAGE (or anything else), there are more intelligent
> ways to get it than opening up the ebuild, digging though the source
> code, and manually performing the variable substitutions that the
> programming language is there to do for us.

> Use the metadata, use eix, use emerge --search, write an echo
> statement into the ebuild, whatever. Don't handicap everyone so that
> you can treat their source code as part of your user interface.

All very well, but it requires the ebuild to a) be parseable by the
package manager and b) already exist inside of an ebuild repository.
Which is for example not the case for a user contributed ebuild
attached to bugzilla.

Ulrich