[Fwd: Re: [gentoo-dev] Package notices]

[Eldad Zack]

On Thu, 2004-09-02 at 21:56, Alexander Gretencord wrote:
> On Thursday 02 September 2004 20:46, Christian Gut wrote:
> > another idea: simply hand them over to syslog. This way they get mailed
> > to the admin and are there for later reference.
>
> Just read Bug #11359 (http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11359). This has
> also been discussed there and is only an option for already installed
> systems.

> In short: The basic mechnism has to work without eMail and without syslog or
> any other fancy stuff. Just think of a bootstrap build, where no such thing
> is available.

What I had in mind could be deployed today, without needing to patch
portage.
Basically, it could be implemented using a new eclass or just adding the
enotice function to eutils - I wouldn't want all the einfos logged,
anyway. (patching notices? no thanks.)

What I would like, would be messages from packages like cacti.
enotice itself will write into the file and emit an einfo.

This is what I had in mind:

# void enotice(char* message)
#
#    write informative message (with a newline) into notice log.
#    also emits einfo.
#
enotice() {
	einfo "${*}"

	if [ -n "${ENOTICE_DIR}" ]
	then
		# Not checking if it ${ENOTICE_DIR} exists since
		# install does stat and stops if it exists.
		install ${ENOTICE_DIR}

		echo "${*}" >> ${ENOTICE_DIR}/${PF}
	fi

        return 0
}

To make it work it only requires that ENOTICE_DIR would be set in
make.conf.

It is also sandbox-friendly, since it is a regular file as far as
portage concerns - and that also makes it binary-friendly. The notices
will be included in the binary tbz2.

The external utility to read the messages is also pretty
straight-forward to write.

I'd like to hear from other developers if they think it is useful and if
they plan to use it...
I would also like to go ahead and use it for any ebuilds I currently
maintain.

-- 

Eldad Zack <eldad@g.o>
Key/Fingerprint at pgp.mit.edu, ID 0x96EA0A93