Re: [gentoo-dev] New ebuild metadata to mark how robust the package is?

[Tobias Klausmann]

Hi! 

On Sat, 17 Oct 2009, Rémi Cardona wrote:
> Now we (gentoo devs) are finally starting to add news items for
> bigger updates (gnome, X, java, etc) and that's a good thing.
> But we definitely cannot and should not use news items for
> minor upgrades.
>
> elog is much better suited for such upgrade notices.
>
> However, since elog was put in portage, ebuilds have been using
> elog/ewarn/einfo _way_ too much. We're now at a point where the
> elog output at the end of an emerge phase is just _useless_
> because of all the noise.

One problem with this is that there is no way to "Acknowledge"
such ewarns/einfos. For example, I really, honestly know that
vanilla-sources isn't supported; I don't need the reminder every
time I upgrade it. Neither does the message from gentoo-sources
help me in any way anymore.

Come to think of it, how about an ewarn/einfo that is only
triggered on fresh installs, but not on upgrades? You can still
warn that foobard needs an etc-update and a restart, but I don't
need to be reminded where the examples are every time.

Ideally, one would be an einfo and one an ewarn, but in my
experience, many messages are ewarns "to be safe" (or so I
suspect).

> And with your metadata proposal, I'm worried the same thing
> will happen. Devs will enable the "troublesome" flag for a
> release, forget to remove it for the next bump and a few months
> later, half the packages in portage are labeled as such.
>
> I really don't want to sound like I want to kill your idea but
> I'm somewhat doubtful it'll really work given our track record
> with other such infrastructure.

As usual with such things, it should as simple as possible to
use, especially when only bumping a package (hence my idea of
separate "one-shot" message functions).


Regards,
Tobias
-- 
printk ("Barf\n");
        linux-2.6.6/arch/v850/kernel/module.c