[gentoo-dev] [RFC] metadata.xml changes related to improved checks

[gentoo-dev] [RFC] metadata.xml changes related to improved checks

[Michał Górny]

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Hello, everyone.

Since the GLEP 68 mail didn't bring much discussion, I would like to
point out explicitly a few things that might require some. They are
mostly listed in backwards compatibility section of the GLEP [1],
and they were caught by XML Schemas [2].

I would like to know your opinion on the problems and suggested
solutions. If there is agreement, I will proceed with either fixing
metadata.xml files whenever fixing it myself will be possible, or file
a bug whenever it will require maintainer's attention.


The most important issues are:

1. Upstream <maintainer/> entries were never allowed to use
<description/>. DTD wasn't able to enforce this but XML Schema is,
and so I'd like to officially start requiring this.

1a. In some cases, this is used to request CC-ing upstream maintainers
on bugs. I think that's a bad idea since people don't usually look at
upstream tags for such an information, and any automated assignment
tool will not even consider them. As an alternative, I'd copy upstream
maintainers to downstream maintainer entries with appropriate
description. This way, both bug-wranglers and any automated tool would
CC them reliably.

2. There are some <pkg/> elements being used along with slot
specifiers, USE dependencies and some more other weird stuff.
The <pkg/> element was intended to be used to allow cross-linking
descriptions to packages.gentoo.org, and as such supports only plain
qualified package name (to link to p.g.o page about the package
in question).

2a. For <pkg/> elements with slots specified, USE dependencies
and versions, I'd like to move the extra bits out of <pkg/>. For
example, <pkg>x11-libs/gtk+:3</pkg> -> <pkg>x11-libs/gtk+</pkg>:3,
<pkg>=app-foo/bar-1</pkg> -> =<pkg>app-foo/bar</pkg>-1.

2b. There's one case when <pkg/> contains wildcard like app-foo/bar-*
to reference multiple packages. Since this won't really work, I'd
remove <pkg/> tag there and leave it as plain text.

3. There are a few restrict="" uses along with USE dependencies
and slot dependencies. Since metadata.xml is not properly
EAPI-versioned, the most correct way would be to assume EAPI=0. I don't
see an obvious fix for most of the packages, so I guess I will file
bugs for all of them.

3a. Furthermore, USE dependencies depend on configuration, and as such
have limited machine processing capabilities (i.e. when assigning bugs
for ebuilds).

4. The <natural-name/> element is being removed. Over 1.5yr of its
existence, it was used only in 4 packages, and only to copy over PN in
different capitalization.

5. A few packages use multiple <bugs-to/> URLs. This element was
intended to be used at most once, e.g. to provide a 'file bug upstream'
link. Having multiple URLs is confusing, as we provide no clear
annotation on which to use. I will file bugs about packages that do
that.


Please let me know what you think about this.


[1]:https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:MGorny/GLEP:68#Known_incompatibilities
[2]:https://github.com/mgorny/gentoo-xml-schema

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny
<http://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/>

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