Re: [gentoo-dev] questions about small fixes/cleanups

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 09/13/2016 02:57 PM, Michael Mair-Keimberger wrote:
>
> * 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?

Yes please.


> * 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.

I would personally leave these alone, but if you want to fix them, go
ahead. The HOMEPAGE is a weird variable, and belongs in metadata.xml
instead. Users actually want to view it, and not on a per-ebuild basis,
but on a per-package one. As a result, all existing package managers
already do the obvious thing and show the newest HOMEPAGE, making the
value in older ebuilds irrelevant.

If the fix were important, you should do a revision bump, but due to the
unusual nature of HOMEPAGE, the change isn't that important.


> 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.

Please file a bug and tell people not to do that. If they ever need to
add a new patch, it would affect old stable ebuilds and violate our
policy on the matter.

It would be nice if we could add this check to repoman; however, some
wildcard constructs are safe. For example, if we're pulling in a bunch
of Debian patches in SRC_URI, it makes sense to apply them all. The
SRC_URI is guaranteed not to change out from under us, unlike the
contents of FILESDIR.


> * 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?


If they're not used by the tree, they probably don't belong in the tree,
but maybe I lack imagination. Can you give a few examples?