It would be nice if we could point to a screenshot using: SCREENSHOT=http://www.foo.com/bar.png ...in ebuilds, or inherit defaut screenshots from eclasses, so that emerge -s would report that URL and GUI frontends could display them. Currently, gentoo-portage.com tries to display packages screenshots but relies on its users good will. Also, every package browsing website (sourceforge, savahna, freshmeat, ...) offers this feature. It's often impossible for a GUI frontend to get a screenshot from the package's base URL. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
sounds like something that should be mailed to gentoo-dev ... probably a feature that would be part of metadata rather than the ebuild
Really don't like this.. It's easy enough to add for the portage side of things, but it's a ridiculous amount of work for ebuild devs. Site layout changes will mean new bugs. New screenshots will mean new bugs. There'll even be "provide a screenshot for qt as well as gtk" type bugs. When an application has screenshots, it's usually just a click away from the app's homepage (which is already required) so this really doesn't seem to be worth the effort.
should go into metadata.xml IMO if at all.
Putting a hold on feature requests for portage as they are drowning out the bugs. Most of these features should be available in the next major version of portage. But for the time being, they are just drowning out the major bugs and delaying the next version's progress. Any bugs that contain patches and any bugs for etc-update or dispatch-conf can be reopened. Sorry, I'm just not good enough with bugzilla. ;)
Consider this closed as WONTFIX. IMHO having $HOMEPAGE is enough, and if there really is a need for a special tag it should go to metadata.xml which isn't our business.
This is how debian included this feature: http://screenshots.debian.net/ A cooperation would be interesting. The database needs only a further column and would look like ID | deb | ebuild | picture
Just to be clear -- is this about people pointing ebuilds to upstream-provided screenshots or us providing screenshots for apps?
if we do choose to support this, Marius is correct in that it belongs in metadata.xml and not the ebuild so i don't think it's a PMS issue. but i don't think we have a general dumping bucket for metadata.xml requests other than base-system or bug-wranglers.
Creeping featurism? HOMEPAGE exists.
*** Bug 533072 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
AppStream is a cross-distro collaboration for package metadata sharing, including a screenshot service: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Distributions/AppStream/