Anthony G. Basile: > On 09/07/14 22:36, Patrick Lauer wrote: >> On Saturday 06 September 2014 16:22:46 hasufell wrote: >>> Anthony G. Basile: >>>> On 09/06/14 12:12, hasufell wrote: >>>>> Anthony G. Basile: >>>>>>> And when you do ask, is a package that's "provided" installed, >>>>>>> and if >>>>>>> so, what's its metadata? >>>>>> When the package is installed, that data should have been cached. >>>>> Afaik there is nothing "cached" if you put stuff in package.provided. >>>>> It's a terrible hack, unless I missed something. >>>> I wasn't sure what Ciaran was talking about there. If its hacky, then >>>> we certainly don't want to standardize it in the GLEP. >>> Well, you have to to define what tools can expect from >>> provided/installed packages. >>> >>> That means either say "you cannot expect anything, because there might >>> or might not be metadata" or say "you can expect metadata for any >>> provided/installed package" in which case package.provided feature has >>> to be removed from portage. >> "Provided" means "not managed by the package manager" and thus returning >> "empty metadata" for queries is perfectly fine. >> >> I don't see why this feature would need to be removed ... >> > > I will explicitly mention "package.provided" in the GLEP as not > returning anything for metadata. >
Please don't. This is portage internal stuff and shouldn't be in the spec. The important part is whether API users can always expect non-empty valid metadata or not. Is there any good argument for allowing empty metadata except to support a broken portage implementation?
