Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: removal of digest files from the tree

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Sun, 2008-01-27 at 17:11 -0800, Zac Medico wrote:
> >> If there are no objections then I don't so any reason not to go ahead and add
> >> the manifest1_obsolete sometime in the near future. Thoughts?
> > Let's do it. I look forward to a lot less inodes on my disks.
>
> Let's schedule a date for it then and we can have a big announcement
> to let everyone know.

Dammit.

I wanted this before January 31st, so it would make it into the 2008.0
snapshot.  Do we think we can get this done by January 31st?

I think so.  One reason that I think that we don't need to wait very
long is rather simple.  People running very old versions of portage that
will be affected by this are also not likely to read our news or see our
front page on a regular basis.  They're likely to get broken, no matter
what we do.  Hell, even posting it to the GMN/forums/lists/planet/front
page, we'll still end up getting complaints from these people when they
come back $months from now and the news is no longer sticky in the
forums, has rotated off the front page, isn't even a distant memory on
the lists, and is in a several month old newsletter.

When gauging impact/scope of a problem, always look at who it affects
and the situation.  You only need to take as much precaution as
necessary to cover the cases worth spending the time to cover.  There
will *always* be corner cases.  You just try to minimize them.

I doubt much of anything aside from portage/paludis/pkgcore use the
digest files, and I'd bet that paludis/pkgcore don't use them, at all.

I think throwing up an announcement today/tomorrow for Thursday/Friday
should be sufficient for this sort of a change, as it won't affect any
user who has a version of portage released in the past ~1.5 years.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Games Developer