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

[Alexander Gretencord]

On Tuesday 16 November 2004 17:47, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> All kidding aside, a better method for getting messages across
> definitely needs to be worked on

There already is a proposal, just see Message-Id: 
<200411161508.13153.m.debruijne@××××××.nl> who pointed this out.

> but at the same time, how many of you don't know that we put messages in the
> ebuilds that you should follow?

Many probably don't want to look at them inside the ebuild, because there 
should be a mechanism to show important information when doing an "emerge 
world", else emerge world has to be removed.

> How many of you simply ignore them anyway and do an "emerge -uD world"
> blindly and don't pay any attention to the nice messages we worked so
> hard to put into the ebuilds?

Many, me included, because I simply can't be bothered to look at the output 
all the time, waiting for the X seconds that I have time to read a msg. I 
start a screen session on the server, look at "emerge world -vp", decide 
which packages to really upgrade, start a merge for them and close my 
terminal. If there is important information, there has to be a way for emerge 
to tell me, without me, waiting for 20 ebuilds to run by, while I stare at 
the screen! And this mechanism should not be "have a logfile somewhere so I 
can read it if I know about it", I at least want to have a message like 
"important information about the last merged ebuilds is available in file 
XXX, have a look at it" beneath my merge. On the other hand, if this is 
possible you can just as easily put the information itself on screen (while 
still saving it to a file, for the case when the screen buffer was too small 
to capture everything).

> However, I said to myself "Hrrmn... It seems hotplug is broken.  Perhaps I
> should read the ChangeLog and see what it says there?" and all was right in
> the universe again.

Thats what I would do too, however, this is not the right solution to the 
problem from a users/admin perspective. The solution is to give the 
user/admin the tools to be notified of important changes automatically. In a 
way that makes sure that you are really able to view the information.

> Unfortunately, there really is only so much hand-holding that we can
> accomplish as developers and still have time to actually *work* on the
> distribution.

Have a look at the bugreport mentioned in the message I refer to earlier.


Alex

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