Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Daniel Drake <dsd@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-dev] Conveying important upgrade messages to user community
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 13:34:36
Message-Id: 419A1921.8040700@gentoo.org
1 Hi,
2
3 (sorry about last mail, hit send too early)
4
5 Recently we introduced an important behaviour change into the hotplug package.
6 It used to autoload modules at bootup, now it doesn't - you have to install
7 and use coldplug for that now.
8
9 We put ewarn messages in the ebuild to warn about this change. We put comments
10 in the hotplug init.d script to warn about this change. I personally did not
11 anticipate it affecting many people (if you are going to load a module on
12 every boot up, why not just build it directly into the kernel).
13
14 However many users were affected by this. It seems people DO build kernel
15 modules for their core hardware, I still don't understand why but thats beside
16 the point here. Users missed the ewarn messages because hotplug was brought in
17 the middle of updates of other packages (didn't help that there was a GNOME
18 stable release around the same time). They did not see the comments in init.d
19 because they used the "-5" option of etc-update to overwrite all files that
20 they had never edited. We had bug reports and less-than-cooperative users
21 flying in from many angles.
22
23 I then resorted to posting this with a kernel announcement on the homepage and
24 getting a mention in the GWN. This was probably a bit late, hasn't seemed to
25 help much but has rather got me more negative feedback from users who have
26 gone for a complete reinstall (!? is there another misconception here? do we
27 need to teach users about the "modprobe" command?) and from those who noticed
28 I haven't taken up their (non-practical or impossible) suggestions to
29 resolving this better.
30
31 My question is, how can we improve this situation? Portage really needs a
32 decent messaging system to convey messages like this. It's in the works,
33 right? It seems long overdue now...
34 Users suggested making the messages appear at the very end of the emerge
35 process ("* X config files in /etc need updating" style), or an etc-update
36 style system where you read messages and dismiss them once you've seen them,
37 or a system which mails you those ewarn messages.
38 I really hope portage will be able to provide functionality something like
39 this soon...
40
41 In the meantime, could we have handled this better with the resources
42 available to us right now? How have other people coped with similar changes?
43
44 Thanks,
45 Daniel
46
47 --
48 gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list

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