Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-project] Portage repo usage survey and change evaluation

[Patrick Lauer]

On 03/02/2016 02:32 AM, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 09:01:19AM +0100, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
>> Have I missed your posting the results of this? Especially, what is
>> the preferred ordering of ChangeLog entries?
> I just hadn't finished putting the results into a long-term format quite
> yet, but did so this afternoon:
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~robbat2/201602-portage-survey/
>
> I have included a CSV of the public answers, excludes only the last
> question about contact info.
>
> Some remarks about question #2 and #3:
>
> Q2: Reduce local disk usage by excluding ChangeLogs?
> ----------------------------------------------------
> It was unfortunately pointed out to me very late that my question #2 had
> some confusing text:
> - "No, but only if were optional (I do NOT want it, but others might)"
> - "Yes, but only if it were optional (I want it, but others might NOT)"
>
> The bracket portion of each answer was interpreted as meaning the
> opposite as the start of each answer :-(.
>
> Either way, ~60% are in favour of getting rid of changelogs.
Well, with those confusing answers I'd interpret it differently:

~15% are in favour of removal (see Q3)
~45% are in favour of available-but-not-default ("No but optional")
~40% are in favour of available and default

That'd be, like, 85% in favour of keeping changelogs, and about half the
people would want an option to remove them.
>
> IMO this is a BETTER goal than continuing to generate them for rsync,
> and bike-shedding about what the order should be; and it provides a huge
> benefit by reducing the size of rsync by 155MiB.
There's no bikeshedding about order (see below), and if most people are
in favour of keeping or providing optionally I don't see how removal is
in the interest of the majority - which was the reason you did this survey.
>
> Q3: What order should ChangeLog entries be in?
> ----------------------------------------------
> - 85.3% of responses either preferred newest first OR didn't care (incl
>   so as long as the tools work).
> - 2.9% wanted oldest first.
> - NOBODY selected "I'd prefer oldest entries first, but do what is best
>   for distribution"
> - 11.8% said get rid of changelogs.
>
So people want ChangeLogs in ChangeLog order. An important, but
unexpected result :)

The obvious thing to do is to continue providing ChangeLogs, in the
obvious order, and possibly document a way for users to exclude them
without breaking Manifest. I'm not sure if there's a simple/clean way to
do that except maybe providing two rsync trees ...