11/19/2007

USE flag metadata

Cardoe wrote this in the late afternoon:

Well following up Diego’s post about the same subject, I too think we need some metadata about what each USE flag does exactly. If you read Diego’s post, my original suggestion was to use use.local.desc but Diego suggested actually using metadata.xml.

After some debate in #gentoo-dev about a good syntax we have setted on the following:
<use> <!-- lang is optional, like in the rest of metadata fields -->
<flag name="disk-partition">Uses libparted from <pkg>sys-apps/parted</pkg> to read partition tables and in the future allow for partition table modification.</flag>
</use>

The new flags added are “use” which has an optional  lang attribute to specify additional languages. Then “flag” which does your heavy lifting via the name attribute. And lastly, I proposed adding “pkg” which would allow cross-linking/referencing from packages.gentoo.org (this was discussed with jokey) and additional apps like kuroo. The “pkg” tag would also be added to “longdescription”.

The final updated metadata.dtd can be seen at http://dev.gentoo.org/~cardoe/files/metadata.dtd and the diff at http://dev.gentoo.org/~cardoe/files/metadata.diff.

* Filed under: General, Linux

4 Responses to “USE flag metadata”

  1. HS Says:
    November 20th, 2007 at 2:30 am

    It would be good to specify if USE flag is just an alternative or it enables/disables some functionality. For example if I turn off dvdread for mplayer it disables the reading of DVD’s at all or it just uses some internal code for it.

    Ideally, the elements and would be perfect. They would describe what are the good and bad effects of turning on the USE flag.

  2. HS Says:
    November 20th, 2007 at 2:33 am

    Sorry, the sentence “Ideally, the elements and would be perfect” is not displayed correctly (it contains xml elements which were not displayed). It should be “Ideally, the elements “pros” and “cons” would be perfect.

  3. spaetz Says:
    November 20th, 2007 at 2:37 am

    Yes please! That will increase the utility of USE flags even more as I can tweak them better if I actually understand what they really do for each package.

  4. hron84 Says:
    November 20th, 2007 at 11:35 am

    It’s a very cool thing, thanks.

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