[gentoo-dev] questions about small fixes/cleanups

[Michael Mair-Keimberger]

Hello Gentoo-Team,

For some time now I'm trying to help improve the gentoo tree. I've
started with fixing some HOMEPAGE variables in ebuilds and now removing
obsolete patches from packages.
Usually (especially with obsolete patches) it's quite simple to fix
things, however every now and then i find some "special" cases were i
don't know whats correct way to fix it.
Even though i could ask on irc, I'm usually to lazy and now there are a
few question were i would like to have an answer for. :)

Homepages:
* Dead homepages: I know there is this general rule of pointing to the
	No_homepage wiki page if there is no upstream homepage. However, 
	when I fixed some homepage's i usually used an archived [1] homepage
	of the original homepage. While for some dev's this isn't a
	problem, others do not like the idea.
	Personally i would prefer having some homepage rather than no
	homepage at all. It would be nice to have a clear statement 
	about that.
* Waiting time: I couldn't find any references of how long to wait until
	a homepage can be changed because it's offline. Usually i would
	check for bugs, because if the bug is already quite old and the
	homepage is still offline it's safe to say we can change them.
	However, i also have an script which checks for offline
	homepages. But since a homepage can be temporally offline or just
	not available from my side of the internet i would like to know
	how long i should wait until i can fix it. I think 1 month
	would be a good start?
* Redirection: There are quite a few pages which aren't exactly offline,
	but only forward the request to the current homepage. (like most
	of the gentoo project pages). I haven't touch them yet, but i
	would like to know if fixing them would be appreciated?
* old ebuilds: It's often the case that if a homepage get's changed,
	older versions of the ebuild still use the old homepage. While
	it looks like portage/eix always show's the homepage of the
	newest ebuild i would like to know if older versions should be
	updated as well. Especially if only the homepage gets changed
	which usually doesn't require a reversion bump.

Patches:
* Wildcard patching: Usually i use my "patchtest" script for finding
	obsolete patches and while it still finds lots of false
	positives i also saw a rather odd patching style: Patching via
	wildcards. For example: 
	epatch "${FILESDIR}"/${P}*.patch
	I looks a bit unsafe to use wildcards for patching, but I
	couldn't find anything which forbids it. Would be nice to know
	if that is ok.
* scripts in FILESDIR: In some packages i found scripts which doesn't
	get used by the ebuild, but is probably used for generating
	patches/tarballs. Should i file a bugs about them as i though the
	FILESDIR should be only used for patches. Wouldn't be
	/etc/portage/scripts the perfect place for such scripts?

Metadaa:
* metadata.xml: In order to find the correct maintainer for PR's I've
	opened on github i also wrote a simply python scripts which 
	extract's the metadata.xml files.
	Regarding GLEP 68 a name isn't required for a maintainer. However,
	if i see only a e-mail address in one package, the same e-mail in
	another package but also with a name, is it appreciated to fix
	the first package?

I hope those questions aren't too stupid and i hope i can get some
answers as it would make some decisions a bit easier..
Also please don't judge my English, it's not the best :)

Furthermore i also suggest creating a wiki page for people who look for
simple tasks were they can help improve gentoo.
After all, removing obsolete patches or update HOMEPAGE variables isn't
really difficult, but it's a nice start to get involved. - and those are
just two tasks, which btw are already quite heavy. (it's about 2 months now
since i look for obsolete patches, and I'm now at dev-python...).
I know i could start that by myself, but I'm really bad at wikis :D


[1] http://libarchive.org/

-- 
greetings
Michael Mair-Keimberger