Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: "Miroslav Šulc" <fordfrog@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-dev] Re: HOMEPAGE and DESCRIPTION in ebuilds? (was: Usefulness of HOMEPAGE=https://www.gentoo.org)
Date: Wed, 04 Dec 2019 12:44:35
Message-Id: 4d591628-9956-a952-29bd-af6accc136c6@gentoo.org
In Reply to: [gentoo-dev] Usefulness of HOMEPAGE=https://www.gentoo.org by "Michał Górny"
1 hi,
2
3 it's proly little bit off this topic, but why do we have to copy
4 homepage and description from ebuild to ebuild? wouldn't it be better to
5 move this information to metadata.xml and keep it just there? or does in
6 reality one package really have various homepages and various
7 descriptions for different versions? metadata.xml could also contain
8 more structured data like you outlined, i.e. link to homepage,
9 sources/repository, bug tracker and possibly other.
10
11 miroslav
12
13 Dne 04. 12. 19 v 13:36 Michał Górny napsal(a):
14 > Hi,
15 >
16 > Many of Gentoo-originating packages are listing the main Gentoo site
17 > as HOMEPAGE. In my opinion, this is suboptimal (not to say 'useless').
18 >
19 > I can think of a few uses for HOMEPAGE:
20 >
21 > 1. providing additional information about the package (before the user
22 > chooses it),
23 >
24 > 2. providing easy access to (additional) documentation,
25 >
26 > 3. providing easy access to package sources,
27 >
28 > 4. providing easy access to bug reporting,
29 >
30 > 5. providing easy access to downloads.
31 >
32 > A good HOMEPAGE is dedicated to the package in question, and makes it
33 > easy to find all the stuff (and all other stuff the user might need).
34 > The more effort user needs to put into finding what he needs, the worse
35 > HOMEPAGE is.
36 >
37 > Now, if I consider gentoo.org as a HOMEPAGE for ~90 packages it
38 > currently is, it's horribly bad. I suppose that in some cases authors
39 > meant to indicate that Gentoo is the package's upstream. However, by
40 > going to the main Gentoo site, it's *very hard* to find anything about
41 > the package in question.
42 >
43 > Just please select a totally random package from those listing
44 > gentoo.org as HOMEPAGE, then go to gentoo.org and try to find either
45 > of the points listed above. If you click 'Downloads', you're certainly
46 > not going to find anything relevant. Through 'Support', you may
47 > eventually find that tiny Bugzilla button at the bottom... and then try
48 > to find the correct Product. You may also find gitweb link somewhere,
49 > and try to see if the project has a repo there. Or maybe it's somewhere
50 > else, or maybe it existed on somebody's devspace once.
51 >
52 > My point is: gentoo.org as a HOMEPAGE sucks. Please use something more
53 > specific instead. Even link to gitweb would be more helpful because it
54 > would at least be relevant to the package in question.
55 >

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