Re: [gentoo-dev] About forcing rebuilds of other packages issue

[Pacho Ramos]

El mar, 05-06-2012 a las 08:44 -0400, Aaron W. Swenson escribió:
[...]
> "There's never anything important in all that text." - Anonymous
> Gentoo User
>
> We've already determined that the users don't read the output. This is
> a known fact. Something I repeat in #gentoo more often than I care to
> admit is "Seriously, read the output." I agree with the users that
> there's too much output, and some of the output is indeed useless.
>
> The output they aren't reading isn't just rebuild commands, but also
> the next step they're supposed to take after the emerge has finished,
> groups their users need to be in to use a particular feature, et cetera.
>
> The ideal solution is for the Ebuild to instruct the PMS to rebuild
> the dependent packages.
>
> We can have a variable called REBUILD. All packages that would need to
> be rebuilt can be listed in it. Only those packages that are installed
> would be built. The actual list of the packages to be rebuilt would be
> determined at dependency checking time. That way, the user can approve
> the rebuild of the packages.

We all know what would be the "ideal solution", the problem is how to
implement it (and how many years we need to wait to get it working).

>
> Just placing the commands in a separate log won't really solve a whole
> lot. Further, it will bump any elog messages even further down in the
> importance ranking.
>

It will allow administrators to easily automate via scripts rebuilding
of packages, allowing them to get system more solid after a big update.
Also, currently I usually need to surf in big summary.log to directly
find commands to rebuild things because most of elog messages are
useless to me (a lot of them because they are always shown in every
update and are useful only the first time you read them, other times you
already remember, for example, how to setup e4rat). 

Current situation of breaking systems when people don't read summary.log
JUST AFTER update completes won't help to force people to read them,
will simply break their systems and give a really poor impression of
Gentoo breaking easily when updating. Think, for example, on a lot of
people that leaves system updating at night time, then, when he/she
tries to use it next morning he sees some things are broken and need to
be rebuilt. All that rebuilding work could be done during the same night
but, due current way of handling things, he needs to have his system
broken during more hours (when he needs to use it) until things are
rebuilt.