GLEP:5

Abstract
As the latest development in Gentoo and Portage added the metadata.xml file to each package, which provides information about the package and its maintainers, this GLEP proposes to extend this format in order to simplify the .ebuild format.

Status
Timed out

Motivation
The metadata.xml standard was accepted and it already contains some information about the packages (longdescription).

Specification
Add the tags  to the metadata.xml 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 file. This would also allow different descriptions for different languages (lang attribute) and there are no problems when a program 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 ...

Copyright
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.