Our current policy [1] requires that ebuilds must assign the seven variables DESCRIPTION, HOMEPAGE, SRC_URI, LICENSE, SLOT, KEYWORDS, and IUSE, even if their value is empty.
Could we drop this requirement? Repoman already enforces that DESCRIPTION, HOMEPAGE, LICENSE, SLOT, and KEYWORDS are non-empty (with some exceptions for virtuals). I don't see why we need to distinguish the "empty value" and "not assigned" cases. For example, many live ebuilds already don't define SRC_URI. I'm not aware of any problems caused by this. Ulrich [1] <http://devmanual.gentoo.org/ebuild-writing/variables/#required-variables>
