I am currenty working on the new packages.gentoo.org (https://github.com/gentoo/packages.gentoo.org/) which has given me the opportunity to review the way package metadata is stored throughout the tree, and I have come to the conclusion that the HOMEPAGE and DESCRIPTION values don't actually belong in ebuilds. I believe they should instead be migrated to the metadata.xml file for each package. First there's the issue of projects changing their homepages. Every time a project changes their home page all existing ebuilds have an invalid homepage value attached to them. These ebuilds will continue to link to the non-working homepage until they're removed from the tree. Because of this, for packages.gentoo.org the only reliable way to fetch the current homepage for a project is to get the newest homepage value from the latest ebuild. Second, I have observed a couple of packages throughout the tree seem to misuse the package DESCRIPTION value, such as =net-fs/samba-4.1.11's ebuild which describes the package as "Samba Suite Version 4", a useless description and not accurate for all of the ebuilds found under net-fs/samba. Finally, by moving these values into metadata.xml, it will become possible to localize package descriptions in the same way category metadata.xml localizes longdescription. This should be possible to introduce in a backwards compatible way so that no EAPI bump is required for this feature, the only thing that will need to be changed is portage search & repoman, so that they will use metadata.xml if the values are present within. Reproducible: Always
This was raised several times already in the mailing lists, and there never was any consensus for it. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 186454 ***
