Re: [gentoo-dev] Conveying important upgrade messages to user community

[Simon Stelling]

Hi

M. Edward Borasky wrote:

> Whenever you do "emerge sync", you get a list of "release notes" for
> everything that has changed since your last sync. I know Portage is
> smart enough to do this sort of thing, because it told me I had to
> update my /etc/make.profile last night, and it tells me when I need to
> update Portage. While you're at it, a list of new packages would be
> nice.

I think this is rather a bad solution, because...:

1. to much noise
there are about 10'000 packages in portage, i have installed ~500 of
them. i really don't care about release notes for foo/bar if it isn't in
my system

2. automatics
probably most gentoo-users do their emerge sync with a cron-job or
something similiar, because there is really no need to view the output
of an emerge sync. so this wouldn't help at all

3. emerge sync != emerge package
i am one of these who do their emerge sync at lunch time and then update
the system in the evening, when i have more time.

beside of that, there are also users with limited internet access and
those probably do a emerge sync only if there's a important security fix
in a new version. so what if they installed foo-bar-2.4, a month later
2.6 became stable and in 2.8 there's a important security fix. the
upgrade from 2.4 to 2.6 directly and they wouldn't see the "release
notes" and blame us again ;)

your proposal would work great if every user would do a manual emerge
sync && emerge -uD world every day, but that's not the case.

blubb