would be great if `eselect profile list` would check for a metadata.xml in the directory and if so, extract the description field and display it. this way we can better describe the purpose of profiles than have people guess at it based on the simple/short name.
This could be done if the information was available from some file that is easy to parse from bash. If it's XMl, then I don't think that adding things like XML-XPath to eselect's dependencies is a godd idea.
(In reply to comment #1) inventing another file format when we already have a standard (and one that supports localization) doesn't seem like a good idea i don't see a problem with having an optional USE=xml in eselect and if the user builds it with USE=-xml, it uses sed to dump the first entry if xml --version >/dev/null; then echo `xml sel -t -m pkgmetadata -v longdescription ${metadata_xml}` else tr '\n' ' ' < ${metadata_xml} | \ sed -r 's:.*<longdescription[^>]*>([^<]*).*:\1:' fi