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

[Rémi Cardona]

Hi Daniel,

Le 17/10/2009 01:29, Daniel Bradshaw a écrit :
> So as I say, it occurs to me that most people probably follow some
> variation of this selective upgrade method.
> It might be handy to have some kind of metadata in the ebuilds that can be
> used to indicate a package that is "demanding".
> Then that flag could be used to highlight the package on a dep tree, or
> optionally to block the emerge unless the package is specified explicitly.

IMHO, we already have the infrastructure for such info. We have elog and 
news items.

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.

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.

Cheers :)

Rémi