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

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Sat, 5 Nov 2005 22:18:14 +0900 Jason Stubbs <jstubbs@g.o>
wrote:
| > A more reliable way of getting news of critical updates out to
| > users is required to avoid repeats of the various recent upgrade
| > debacles.
| 
| Examples of the "recent upgrade debacles" aren't needed, but you
| should at least state some of the outcomes that occurred, whether it
| be unscheduled downtime, data corruption or whatever.

I'm trying to avoid throwing in too many unnecessary references, but I
guess a couple here would be useful.

| 
| > Preemptive
| >     Users should be told of changes *before* they break the user's
| > system, after the damage has already been done.
| 
| s/after/when/ perhaps? This sentence takes a couple of reads...

Ring up another one for me hitting . in Vim forgetting that I'd done a
daw after the gq} ...

| > Quality control
| >     There should be some way to ensure that badly written or
| > irrelevant messages are not sent out, for example by inexperienced
| > developers, those whose English language skills are below par or
| > morons.
| 
| "morons" is not needed either.

No, but it's funny!

| > The following headers are used for filtering. If none of these
| > headers are specified, the news item is displayed for all users.
| > Otherwise, the news item is displayed if *at least one* header
| > matches.
| 
| It would seem more useful if the headers were sorted into the three
| classes first. A news item would then only be displayed if a header
| from the class matches or the class is empty. This would allow for
| rules such as "net-www/apache is installed and the keyword is either
| mips or sparc".

Hrm. I'll need to think about that. But it's starting to sound nicer
than the and/or/none voodoo I'd removed previously.

| Isn't keyword just a generalization of profile? Why have both?

Simplicity.

| > Thus, all proposed news items must be posted to the ``gentoo-dev``
| > or ``gentoo-core`` mailing list, and ``Cc:``\ed to
| > ``pr@g.o`` at least 72 hours before being committed
| > (exceptions may be made in exceptional circumstances). Any
| > complaints regarding wording or clarity **must** be addressed
| > before the news item goes live.
| 
| Why gentoo-core? It's a news item; it's purpose is to be made public.

Possible security concerns. Hopefully this will never happen.

| Why put this in portage at all? Post sync hooks will likely be
| available in 2.0.54. If adding hooks were as easy as adding a file to
| a portage config directory, would adding the package that does the
| above to the system package set be enough to force this new
| information dispersal method on users?

Performance. I have a bash script which does the installs that could
easily be called by a hook, but it has to call portageq quite a bit.
Otherwise a hook would be fine... Possibly it's fine anyway?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Anti-XML, anti-newbie conspiracy)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm