Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Restricted version of gentoo-dev mailing list

[Walter Dnes]

On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 05:51:00AM -0400, Rich Freeman wrote

> What value would be obtained by posting this stuff for user comment?
> I'd also note that only one of those was posted on -dev-announce for
> comment as far as I'm aware.  Two are package/project-level changes
> which typically don't get wide discussion.

  I was using the Firefox PulseAudio event as another example of stuff
that happens in some obscure location that ordinary users don't know
about.  It was https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247056
YES!!! It was done as a bug in the Firefox bugzilla.  How many regular
users religiously follow that?

  There were some people who "upgraded" Firefox one day, and discovered
that sound no longer worked on it.  It was done with so little
communication that several Firefox maintainers for various linux distros
(i.e. not exactly ordinary users) were unaware that they should set
PulseAudio as a hard dependancy for Firefox.

  An item I just remembered was the switchover from "/dev/hda" to
"/dev/sda".  One day I upgraded (the kernel?), and got a panic at the
next bootup.  Fortunately, I have a "Production" and an "Experimental"
kernel in my LILO menu, so I was able to reboot, and fall back to the
previous kernel.  A new kernel always goes into "Experimental".  I
"promote" the Experimental kernel to Production after it has run without
problems for a couple of weeks.

  Another one was when font packages stopped generating ISO8859-1 fonts
if you didn't add the "nls" USE flag.  No news item.  Xfreecell stopped
working because it couldn't find the font.

  The point I'm trying to make is that these kind of surprises should
not happen, be they OS-level or application-level.  Regular users should
not have to follow this list.  Even if you're not going to alter course
regardless of feedback, at least let users know so they're not caught
unawares.  If nothing else, post news items to Gentoo-user ***AHEAD OF
TIME*** warning about changes like these.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications