[gentoo-dev] Portage 2.0.51 comments/questions

[Duncan]

OK, I've been running portage 2.0.51-whatever for several releases, and
it's certainly beginning to shape up nicely!  Here are some
comments/questions/suggestions, FWTW..

1) The new "spinner" is /very/ cool!

Some of the phrases, however, are a bit difficult to make out, as the
scanning is a bit to fast to read (at least on my dual opteron). Could a
couple more letters be lit up at the same time? Just from observation (not
looking at the code), it appears one letter is lit at "bright", the ones
on each side same color (green), but without the brite attribute. Maybe
make double that to two letters brite, two on each side normal.. or maybe
three. 

Anyway, it's a /very/ cool feature!  Whoever came up with the idea and if
the idea was borrowed from elsewhere, whoever decided it'd be cool for
portage to have it also, I AGREE!  Major kudos!  It immediately impressed
me!

2) Documentation is coming alone nicely.

It's nice to see updated 2.0.51 versions of the various man pages, now.

I'm seeing a couple things missing still, tho.  The main one I noticed was
the portage (5) manpage doesn't list the new /etc/portage/profile yet. 
Also, an earlier einfo mentioned /etc/portage/profiles/virtuals while the
new inject depreciated message mentions
/etc/portage/profile/package.provided.  I assume these are supposed to
both be the same dir, but don't know whether it's profile or profiles. 
Granted, a typo or changed policy is fine, but without documentation
confirming one or the other as right, I'm left guessing.

3) What about the QA Notices?

Evidently .51 is rather stricter in some things than .50 and a number of
things are QA Notices now that were silent, before.  Are things to the
point where it's worthwhile bugging the various ebuilds that emit these
notices, illegal eclass inheritance and the like, or are there still
enough of them it'd just be unnecessary noise?

What about that security notice I've seen pop up a few times?  Example:

QA Notice: Security risk /usr/bin/crontab. Please consider relinking with
'append-ldflags -Wl,-z,now' to fix.

What's this mean?  What are the implications?  How do I do that relinking
if I decide I need to?   Can I fix it by enabling a feature in make.conf
or do I run a separate command?  Either way, there's not enough info there
to actually DO it, nor do I even have enough info to rightly evaluate the
"security risk"!

There's simply not enough there to be anything but a teaser, yet it's
labeled security risk.  Someone's being *MEAN* with their teasing! =:^\

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin



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