Re: [gentoo-dev] GLEP ??: Critical News Reporting

[Paul de Vrieze]

On Friday 04 November 2005 02:24, Nathan L. Adams wrote:
> I have read it, and I find it lacking; thus the comments. Or are you
> claiming that the idea of having a central website like errata.g.o with
> GuideXML-ized migrations guides is in your GLEP? Its not. I'm proposing
> adding that as the definative source of the errata, and feeding it to
> other places (emerge --news, mailing lists, forums, GWN) as desired.

I agree with Ciaran here. Emerge --news should be authoritive. I'm not 
opposed to erata.gentoo.org, but it is easy to generate from the tree. If 
there would be a master format to generate both from, that would also be 
OK, but news items in the tree is probably the best answer. And it is 
easy to display when pretending. One could even give a warning (in 
advance) when a user is trying to update an affected package (perhaps 
this should be an extra header item).

>
> I'm also commenting on the part that *wrongly* states "It is not
> reasonable to expect all users to have an MTA, *web browser*, email
> client, cron daemon or text processing suite available on their system.
> In particular, this means that any markup to be parsed must be in a
> very simple format."
>
> *ALL* of the official docs are GuideXML; Gentoo *expects* users to have
> a web browser by default. Otherwise a vast majority of users would
> never get Gentoo installed in the first place. The "lightweight"
> requirement appears to just be your way of subverting the current
> documentation standards (because of your XML hatred).

No, gentoo expects people to have access to a webbrowser. But not all the 
time. It is perfectly reasonable to expect people to make a nice printout 
of the handbook at the office, and then take it at home to install a nice 
new gentoo box.

> The news directory shouldn't the main source of the migration guides;
> the website should be (one central page that can feed other sources).

The website should not as it a pull source of information. It requires 
users to actively acquire the information. What is worse is that some 
users might not update for a prolongued time (6 months). At that time 
they will not find the information in the erata list anymore. But they 
will get the RELEVANT news delivered by emerge/enews.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@g.o
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net