Re: [gentoo-dev] GLEP ??: Critical News Reporting

[Brian Harring]

On Tue, Nov 01, 2005 at 02:24:40AM +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Oct 2005 20:16:30 -0600 Brian Harring <ferringb@g.o>
> wrote:
> | On Tue, Nov 01, 2005 at 01:51:25AM +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> | > ``Posted:``
> | >   Date of posting, in ``dd-mmm-yyyy`` format (e.g. 14-Aug-2001).
> | >   Mandatory.
> |
> | Don't have a good arguement as to why it should be added, but utc
> | time seems like it should be included.
>
> Ok. I nicked the Posting: header from GLEPs, which only use dates. Are
> posting times relevant for news items?

Only relevant if you get a sameday version bump for a news item, which 
shouldn't occur, but stupid stuff does occur.

Like I said, don't have a good "you must do it cause of x" reason, 
just a gut feeling it should be there.


> | > ``Display-If-Installed:``
> | >     A dependency atom or simple package name (for example,
> | >     ``<dev-lang/php-5_alpha`` or ``net-www/apache``). If the user
> | > has the package specified installed, the news item should be
> | > displayed.
> |
> | You're going to run into issues with slotmoves for longterm...
> |
> | I'd personally rather the translation/updating of the atoms specified
> | for this field does *not* occur in portage clientside, iow it's
> | handled server side.
>
> Would adding news/ to the "list of stuff that must be changed when you
> do a package move" suffice?

Manual labor == potential for screwup. :)

Should be automatic serverside im, just for the sake of older news 
items still pointing to appropriate location of a package.


> | > News Item Display
> | > -----------------
> | >
> | > Whenever relevant unread news items are found, ``emerge`` will copy
> | > the news file into ``/var/lib/gentoo/news/``.
> |
> | Expand this to address N repo's all delivering their own news
> | please...
>
> If we have proper named repos... /var/lib/gentoo/news/repo_name/ ? What
> are the plans for multiple repositories exactly?

You'd have to clarify;
Repositories will be labeled by user configuration, but that's a bad 
bit of data to use for /var/lib/gentoo/news/$REPO imo.

Some unique id/label bound with the repo maybe?  and yes... bit of 
overkill, but it's also useful for tracking where/which repo an ebuild 
was installed from.


One thing this glep is missing, and needs to address is signing of the 
news also.  Detached sig probably is best route for the keep it 
simple route you're going.

~harring