[gentoo-dev] Very bad ebuild-writing practice.

[Dan Naumov]

I've just found something that I personally consider very bad ebuild-writing practice and filled a bug-report about it at: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6642 I also think, it's worth pointing out to some who don't visit BugZilla, as I consider the issue to be rather important:

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app-games/quakeforge/quakeforge-0.5.0.ebuild claims to provide the users with a 0.5.0 release. The 0.5.0 release does NOT even exist. The only thing that exists is a 0.5 development branch, from which, a 0.5.0 release will be eventually made.

SRC_URI="http://www.quakeforge.org/files/quakeforge-current.tar.bz2" points to a CVS snapshot that's autogenerated every hour without going through any kind of QA. Since when do we allow ebuilds to point at hourly CVS snapshots of a development tree of a program that is undergoing heavy changes ?! If you emerge quakeforge using that ebuild, it might refuse to compile because the tree is broken at that very moment. It might compile, but the compile options have changed making the ebuild somewhat obsolete. And even if it compiles, it *WILL* break, because it's expected of it, it's a development tree.

Bad. Bad. Bad.
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Sincerely,
Dan Naumov aka Jago