GLEP: 5 Title: Extending metadata.xml Version: $Revision: 1.3 $ Last-Modified: $Date: 2004/11/11 21:27:31 $ Author: Heinrich Wendel , Status: deferred Type: Standards Track Content-Type: text/x-rst Created: 02-Jul-2003 Post-History: 02-Jul-2003, 11-Nov-2004 Abstract ======== As the latest development in Gentoo and Portage added the metadata.xml file to each package, which provides information about the package and it's maintainers, this GLEP proposes to extend this format in order to simplify the .ebuild format. Status ====== Timed out Motivation ========== The metadata.xml [1]_ standard was accepted and it already contains some information about the packages (longdescription). Specification ============= Add the tags to the metadata.xml [1]_ and remove them from the .ebuild files. All ebuilds and the emerge -S feature have to be changed to use the new format. Rationale ========= The three tags description, homepage and license are mostly the same in all versions of an ebuild, but they must be added to each version. In order to simplify the .ebuild format they can be moved to the new metadata.xml [1]_ file. This would also allow different descriptions for different languages (lang attribute) and there are no problems when a programm changes it license (restrict attribute). Backwards Compatibility ======================= As it will take some time to do the changes on every ebuild, portage should still support the old format for some time. Reference Implementation ======================== not yet ... References ========== .. [1] Gentoo Herds Project [http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/metastructure/herds/#doc_chap2] Copyright ========= This document has been placed in the public domain.