[gentoo-dev] [RFC] Saving package emerge output (einfo, elog, ewarn, etc.) somewhere official

[Joe Peterson]

I recently had a user write to me after banging his head against the
wall for a while, trying to get a package working.  By the time he wrote
me, he had already figured it out, but he wanted to convey to me that
what finally helped was actually the emerge output (which stated exactly
how to get things working - in this case, the need to run emerge
--config).  He had not noticed this before and only saw it upon
re-installing, given the transient nature of the emerge messages.

Bottom line here is that there is extremely valuable and critical info
in our emerge output.  In a way, these messages are like Gentoo-specific
READMEs (or release notes and/or install instructions).  However, it is
not saved for a user to use as a resource later (well, except that it is
partially saved in the master emerge.log, but that's not quite useful
enough).  There is no "official" place to go to look for Gentoo
instructions; /usr/share/doc is one logical place, but it only contains
files actually installed, not the notes output by emerge (and these are
usually upstream-supplied, not Gentoo).

I propose that, upon merging a package, we save the emerge messages in
either: 1) a package-specific file that resides somewhere "official" or
2) in the portage DB, so that the messages can be re-read via a portage
utility.  In the latter case, either a new option to "equery" or a new
"q" command (e.g. "equery readme <pkg>" or "qreadme <pkg>" could
retrieve the text).

In either case, there would then be a place to go that is known and
consistent (and can be documented in the Gentoo doc).  It could, in
essense, serve as a kind of "Gentoo package README" collection.  I could
also imagine later expanding on this by letting a given package also
include more thorough README info from a file if the maintainer so desires.

						-Joe