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

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Thu, 2005-11-10 at 21:33 +0000, Stuart Herbert wrote:
> My personal conclusion was that there is only one place where we can
> have any degree of certainty that we have the attention of 100% of the
> userbase - or as near as damn it.  I believe that place is right beneath
> the message that tells the user they have CONFIG_PROTECTED files that
> need updating.

I agree that portage should have some way of showing the number of news
items.

> Hence emerge --news.

Why?

There's no "emerge --etc" or "emerge --etc-update" functionality.  Why
must it be "emerge --news" at all?

I think this would completely remove the "portage as a news reader"
problem entirely.  Portage would check a directory for news items.  The
news reader would take care of them after this.  Portage would do
nothing more than look at the directory for unread news items and
display that number.

> If you have found *one* place where we are even more likely to have the
> attention of 100% of the userbase, please share it with us.  If there's
> a better place, we should use that instead, and I will very happily
> support it.

I agree that we should have news delivered by emerge --sync.  I also
think that we should increase the placement of important information on
our site, gentoo-announce, and the forums.  It is my personal opinion
that we should put the news out on as many mediums as possible.

> If we can put something together that takes the news available through
> emerge --news, and pushes it out via other places (web, mailing lists,
> whatever), I have no real problem with that.

I think this should be a requirement.

> But I think that there is a very good reason why it needs to come later,
> why now is *not* the time.

Ehh...

> We need to establish *one* authoritative source of news.  We can't do
> that if we simultaneously launch several sources of news all at once.
> We have to launch *one* service first, give the userbase time to adjust
> to that, and then start making the news available via additional
> sources.

No, we really don't.  Our users aren't idiots.  They just aren't reading
the information presented to them.  While I agree that we need to have a
single location for news, I also think that we must *require* this
information be present in other locations.  The main reason for this is
that "emerge --news" is filtered based on the packages installed on the
system.  What about administrators that have lots of different systems?
To them, it might be easier to receive all of the news, via
gentoo-announce, and filter them via their own methods to determine what
is important to them.  Perhaps I want to search for an old news item.
Why shouldn't I be able to go to a web site and enter my query in a
search box and get all of the major news updates to dev-lang/php?

If you want to reach 100% of the user base, then we should make this
useful for as many situations as possible.  I know that with the number
of machines that I administer, it would be much easier for me to get
*all* of the news in one place and determine what is valid for my
machines, rather than having to read them on each individual machine
based on the packages installed.

> > Don't worry I'll shut up now as there is clearly no interest for a bit
> > broader thinking.
>
> I find your thinking anything but broad on this topic.

*cough*

Pot.  This is kettle.

*grin*

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