Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[Alan McKinnon]

On 03/06/2014 21:50, Samuli Suominen wrote:
>
> On 03/06/14 21:58, Peter Stuge wrote:
>> Steev Klimaszewski wrote:
>>> Instead of belittling the users because they are wasting so much of
>>> your time
>> Causing a rougher transition than neccessary is a waste of users' time.
>>
>> I don't think that's awesome.
>>
>>
>> //Peter
>>
>
> I still don't understand how the news item helps anything, it's all
> matter of running
> one command, or two at most, `eix upower` after seeing blockers, seeing
> 2 different
> options, selecting which one to go with, emerging it
> I'd say such handholding distracts real admins from the real news items
> that actually
> require paying attention :/



Yes, it *is* a simple matter of running one easy command. Portage does
that for you with trivial ease. But portage doesn't tell you *which* is
the one easy command.

A news item does that.


Please realise that groking Portage's output takes considerable skill,
understanding and familiarity with the scene. It's much easier when you
know what will be printed before you run it - perhaps you are in that
position?

I've been using Gentoo for 10 years and portage still baffles me more
often than it should. I resort to reading the ebuild to figure it out.
Funny thing is, portage has the same information available as I do so
why doesn't it print more human-friendly output? At least we got past
that "satisfied by no parents in slot" stuff and now we have cute carets
that point to stuff like some compilers.

The point is, human communication is vastly more powerful than machine
communication in cases like these, and a news item fits the bill
perfectly. There are still 1000s of users out there who haven't run
across this upower stumble yet, a news item will help them a lot and
will be very well accepted (aka Samuli gets brownie points from user for
caring)


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com