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

[Michał Górny]

On czw, 2017-08-03 at 23:24 -0400, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> On 08/03/2017 06:33 PM, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> > > > > > > On Thu, 3 Aug 2017, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> > > The developer handbook that I just said didn't mention variables in
> > > HOMEPAGE at all.
> >
> > 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
>
> Which is good, because it's a silly rule, and hundreds of ebuilds in the
> tree wisely ignore it.

There's a significant difference between being unaware of a policy
and intentionally disrespecting it. Now that you've been made aware, we
can start pursuing 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.

Why is it fine for you to handicap everyone else for your personal
laziness? As it's been told more than once, you write ebuild *once*,
people read it *multiple times*.

When reviewing pull requests, submitted ebuilds etc. I *have to* verify
this stuff. I don't have time to copy everything to a local tree just to
get some random tool process it correctly and give me the value I need.
Just to figure out there's some trivial issue that blocks any further
progress, and I will have to do this again, and again, and again.
Because someone thinks it's cool to save 5 bytes in variable references.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny