Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: GLEP 42 "Critical News Reporting" Round Two

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Sun, 2005-11-13 at 01:05 +0900, Jason Stubbs wrote:
> > It is my opinion that the news reading application need not be
> > integrated into portage.  As far as I have understood it, the only real
> > thing that anyone has required portage itself to do is to
> > *automatically* spit out "You have $n unread news messages.  Please use
> > $bleh to read them" at certain times (after sync, after --pretend,
> > before/after a merge).  I don't see this as being something very
> > complex.  I would assume that some extra code would need to be written
> > into the sync code somewhere to sort the messages.
>
> This, I get. What I'm wondering about is the `emerge --news` that is referred
> to every so often.

emerge --news is just what people have been calling the news reader.  As
far as I can see, unless you *want* portage to handle the news reading,
it should *not* have a --news option.

> To be honest, this is the part that I don't like the most. Integrating code
> into portage to copy files here and there based on some predefined rules and
> news readers reading and renaming files based on some predefined rules...
> A filesystem based API just doesn't seem very robust to change.
>
> I'd prefer that either the post-sync handling code is not integrated into
> portage and portage just triggers some external script - or - portage exposes
> an API (via python and bash) for accessing and updating news items. I'd
> prefer the latter but I get the impression that most prefer the former.

I believe that we have been under the impression that you guys preferred
to keep this out of portage as much as possible.  I think an API built
into portage *would* be the best method for this.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux