Re: [gentoo-dev] New USE flags documentation

[Alec Warner]

On 11/26/07, Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò <flameeyes@×××××.com> wrote:
> CCing council so that the other members can express their feeling about this;
> basically the only people I actually care about getting the feeling about
> this at all.
>
> On Monday 26 November 2007, you wrote:
> > Seems like everyone who contact me/us about this thread is agree about
> > the needed of write a GLEP before doing this kind of global changes.

Er, I think your statement here is wrong, as Diego pointed out ;)

>
> Everyone who contacted who? Why would people contact YOU about this thread?
> They should, if anybody, contact me and Doug, if they think we did it the
> wrong way, or the council, if they thought the proposal was to be stopped (in
> which case I would have notice, being in the council myself). Even better
> they should have opened a bug for the council to stop it.
>
> So. let's face it, the only people who agree on the need for a GLEP is Alec
> and Ciaran. The rest of the thread (which by the way I had to dig up on Gmane
> because I didn't really give a damn) is composed by Thilo who think is a
> great idea, and by Jer who answered to Thilo saying, afaics, that he doesn't
> see the reason to make it *mandatory*. Then there is Doug.

I never said I disliked your idea.  I disliked the way it was rolled
out as it sets bad precedent for future ideas, which can now use this
as an example to do random crap to the tree and not get feedback about
it until it is too late.

>
> Oh wait, everybody who contacted _me_ thinks it's a great idea, or nearly
> everybody. The difference is that people who contacted me did so in the blog,
> so you can read the comments at [1]. Yes I know they don't really count much,
> but counts more of your "everybody who contacted me/us" to me, considering  I
> see only Antarus agreeing with you.
>
> On the proper matter, whether a GLEP is needed or not, well, I already said
> before I think the GLEP process is totally broken, and I don't think that
> waiting for months to get the GLEP approved would help users at all. For what
> it's worth, there is already a GLEP on metadata extension, GLEP 5.. yes FIVE.
> Status: deferred.
>
> I think a markup change is not a problem of GLEPs, I don't think a lot of
> stuff that gone into GLEP process should have, and should just have been
> realised.
>

So to address the only real problem I have with this aside from
setting poor precedent is updating the tools that parse metadata.  If
this, as Doug alluded to in an earlier comment, begins to replace
use.local.desc then I'd like to see the tools fixed to support it.
But maybe this is just another one of those pesky process problems
where someone releases a new change over a holiday and I will wake up
tomorrow with a bug filed against gentoolkit that requests parsing
this new metadata ;)

> And as for Alec's "20 minutes" comment, I would like to remind him that we
> have a lot of people getting obnoxious when you make even a spelling mistake,
> so for a non-native English speaker like I am, the 20 minutes figure is
> totally wrong. And this is also my reason not to write GLEPs ever in my life,
> I don't want to spend two weeks just to get the spelling right. That's a
> waste of my time, and as I'm not devoting my whole life to Gentoo, it ends up
> hurting users again.

Then e-mail the glep to one of the GLEP editors (hey thats me!) and
they will fix all the grammar problems and you can focus on the
content of the thing.

>
> At any rate, if you have any comment regarding the way some dev act, I'd
> suggest you, mostly for good life of both you and the dev involved, to ask
> him BEFORE crapping on him in public. The announcement thing you referred to,
> as Doug explained, was just a time problem, and as we're all volunteer, I
> don't think Doug was forced to find the time to fix the stuff.
>
> So, as I don't really want to waste even more time on this thing that I think
> it's totally a non-issue and just a time wasting thing, I would just ask the
> opinion of the other members of the council. If they think we can proceed, I
> won't stop to add documentation that users can use; if they want to discuss
> it next meeting, I'll wait for it before doing anything; if they think it has
> to be removed and discusse, I'll comment out my metadata (I won't REMOVE
> them, users needs to have proper documentation of USE flags, so as I don't
> find it good for them to remove it, I'll remove it from the semantic of
> metadata until a new syntax could be made official - note that we NEED such
> documentation; if going through GLEP process means making this another
> deferred GLEP and thus giving up on documenting the USE flags for another
> year or two, then I'll be ready to fight the decision until devrel removes me
> from my position).

I don't think a rollback is necessary.  If necessary I will write up
the GLEP and get it approved as I'd like to have some record of the
change besides the cvs logs for the metadata.dtd (things like
rationale and thoughts on backwards compatabilty are nice to have
written down)

>
> [1]
> http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/articles/2007/11/19/lets-actually-get-some-metadata#comments
>
> --
> Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
> http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/
>
>
>
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