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

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 22:37 +0000, Stuart Herbert wrote:
> > Things that should definitely be changed:
> > - Integration with existing systems:
> > This definitely should be a requirement for the GLEP to be considered
> > final. It doesn't prevent some thing being implemented sooner than
> > others, but multi-channel distribution (to use a buzzword) is a
> > requirement from where I come from.
>
> One of the key things with successfully delivering a change programme is
> to not dilute the change by introducing too many at once.

Umm... what?

> If we simultaneously launch emerge --news w/ (f.ex) gatewaying to
> gentoo-announce, I believe that it weakens the impact of introducing
> emerge --news.

As I stated in my last email, emerge --news is not comprehensive enough
of a system to be usable by everyone.  The only solution to this is to
introduce a system that delivers the same information across multiple
mediums.

How would I know about a new update to apache if I don't have it
installed on my workstation, use a remote portage tree delivered via NFS
to my servers, and don't use --pretend?  I notice you didn't say
anything about emerge --news being fatal in any way, so if I just type
in "emerge -u world" on said server and then hit "control+a d" to detach
from the screen, when exactly am I going to see that the recent apache
update broke the config file format we had been using?

Where can I search for news on a package that might not exist on my
system?

Where can I find archived news to find out why I made a change
previously to my configurations?

> One of the objectives is to remove confusion from the minds of users
> about where to find the news.  If we can start by pointing at one place,
> and saying "go there", we can clear up the confusion, and then
> afterwards introduce multi-channel distribution when our users "get it",
> so to speak.

Wouldn't it be easy to say "emerge --news, news.gentoo.org, the News
forum, or gentoo-announce... take your pick" than to say to the user
that they must run an emerge --sync to get news delivered to their
machine, and only news that is relevant to the packages installed on
that exact system, making it useless for people that administer multiple
machines?

> I'm all for making the news available via www.g.o etc etc as well - I
> just think doing it all at the same time will not be the most effective
> strategy.

No offense intended by this, but I haven't seen anyone agreeing with you
on this point.  It seems to be your own quest to have the news *only*
delivered by portage.  By your own admission, you want to reach 100% of
the users.  The only effective way to do this is to essentially carpet
bomb the information into several mediums, all containing the *same*
information.  Think about how advertising works.  The idea is to put
your "product", the news, in our case, in front of as many eyes as
possible.  This is best done by utilizing all of the media available to
us.

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