[gentoo-dev] Re: Deleting old news items

[Michael Palimaka]

On 01/03/2018 11:13 AM, Alec Warner wrote:
> Problem:
>
> New stages have numerous news items listed that are likely not relevant,
> but are shown due to limitations in the filtering in NEWS items. E.g. on
> a recent stage3:
>
> nspawntest / # eselect news list
> News items:
>   [1]   N  2013-09-27  Separate /usr on Linux requires initramfs
>   [2]   N  2014-06-15  GCC 4.8.3 defaults to -fstack-protector
>   [3]   N  2014-10-26  GCC 4.7 Introduced the New C++11 ABI 
>   [4]   N  2015-02-02  New portage plug-in sync system
>   [5]   N  2015-07-25  Python 3.4 enabled by default
>   [6]   N  2015-08-13  OpenSSH 7.0 disables ssh-dss keys by default
>   [7]   N  2015-10-22  GCC 5 Defaults to the New C++11 ABI
>   [8]   N  2016-06-19  L10N USE_EXPAND variable replacing LINGUAS
>   [9]   N  2017-11-30  New 17.0 profiles in the Gentoo repository
>
> Many of these are always displayed. For example:
>
> https://gitweb.gentoo.org/data/gentoo-news.git/tree/2015-02-04-portage-sync-changes/2015-02-04-portage-sync-changes.en.txt
>
> has "Display-If-Installed: sys-apps/portage" and will be displayed on
> nearly every Gentoo machine. While relevant in 2015; I'm skeptical that
> its relevant today. I am also considering explicit changes in the
> filtering directives to resolve this in the future.
>
> Glep42 states:
>
> ---
> News Item Removal
>
> News items can be removed (by removing the news file from the main tree)
> when they are no longer relevant, if they are made obsolete by a future
> news item or after a long period of time. This is the same as the method
> used for updates entries.
> ---
>
> I suggest we delete all entries prior to 2016. Git keeps history
> forever, so folks can gander at the old entries on gitweb.gentoo.org
> <http://gitweb.gentoo.org>:
>
> https://gitweb.gentoo.org/data/gentoo-news.git/tree/
>
> -A

I strongly support this idea. I've tried to push this several times in
the past however was met with some resistance from several teams.