| 1 |
On Tue, 16 Nov 2004, Daniel Drake wrote: |
| 2 |
|
| 3 |
> Hi, |
| 4 |
|
| 5 |
<snip> |
| 6 |
|
| 7 |
> My question is, how can we improve this situation? Portage really needs a |
| 8 |
> decent messaging system to convey messages like this. It's in the works, |
| 9 |
> right? It seems long overdue now... |
| 10 |
|
| 11 |
Just in case it was lost in all of the messages... |
| 12 |
|
| 13 |
The correct fix is a combination of solutions: |
| 14 |
|
| 15 |
1. Use the mailing lists to announce changes that will break things |
| 16 |
unless the users take action. |
| 17 |
|
| 18 |
2. Use the newsletter to announce changes that will break things unless |
| 19 |
the users take action. |
| 20 |
|
| 21 |
3. Have emerge print a summary of the changes that will break things |
| 22 |
unless the users take action that were installed in that run after |
| 23 |
emerge finishes running (reducing the emerge output to just this info |
| 24 |
would also work.) |
| 25 |
|
| 26 |
4. Have an option, specifiable in /etc/make.conf, to email the output in |
| 27 |
3 instead. |
| 28 |
|
| 29 |
|
| 30 |
Actions three and four should be fairly easy, as someone mentioned a |
| 31 |
program that apparently runs over the contents of /var/log/portage, and |
| 32 |
produces a list of those changes. It should be trivial to include that |
| 33 |
in portage, or have it installed with portage, and have emerge execute |
| 34 |
it after a run that installed things. |
| 35 |
|
| 36 |
Actions one and two should be fairly easy, as everyone writing to this |
| 37 |
list has demonstrated the technical competence to do the first, and I'm |
| 38 |
sure most of us have demonstrated the technical competence to do the |
| 39 |
second - there's a blurb at the end of every newsletter, informing |
| 40 |
anyone who cares how to get something added. |
| 41 |
|
| 42 |
Note that I expect that we'll have all of the above in place sometime |
| 43 |
before we've hired our tenth full-time developer. While I don't expect |
| 44 |
that we'll have all of them in place before our first full-time |
| 45 |
developer, I certainly wouldn't mind. (I think that, so long as this |
| 46 |
remains a part-timer operation, having two of the four options generally |
| 47 |
available would suffice. That is, until the code items for three and |
| 48 |
four are complete, the first two really should be used.) |
| 49 |
|
| 50 |
> In the meantime, could we have handled this better with the resources |
| 51 |
> available to us right now? How have other people coped with similar changes? |
| 52 |
|
| 53 |
Of course. Actions one and two do not require any code updates. |
| 54 |
|
| 55 |
Ed |
| 56 |
|
| 57 |
-- |
| 58 |
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list |
Archives