Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Deleting old news items

[Alec Warner]

On Sat, Jan 6, 2018 at 11:25 AM, Ciaran McCreesh <
ciaran.mccreesh@××××××××××.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 6 Jan 2018 08:18:19 -0500
> kuzetsa <kuzetsa@×××××.com> wrote:
> > On 01/06/2018 05:05 AM, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> > >>>>>> On Sat, 6 Jan 2018, Duncan  wrote:
> > >> $ equery b news.eselect
> > >> app-admin/eselect-1.4.10 (/usr/share/eselect/modules/news.eselect)
> > >> So in that case it's not the PM, but eselect.
> > > In fact, it is the PM that would do the filtering, before filling
> > > the list of unread news items
> > > in /var/lib/gentoo/news/news-gentoo.read.
> > >
> > > Filtering in eselect news would be problematic: Obtaining the list
> > > of items with "eselect news list" and e.g. reading them with
> > > "eselect news read" are issued as separate commands, which requires
> > > that the list of valid items does not change. However, time-based
> > > filtering could cause a race condition, like an item expiring
> > > between execution of the two commands.
> >
> > The race condition could be addressed by issuing a warning
> > at or around the time when expirations occur (midnight),
> > with or without detecting specific expirations which may
> > have occurred:
>
> How accurate is "around"? Obviously we'd need to introduce a user
> configuration option so different users could set appropriate values
> for their needs.
>
> Seriously though, all this complexity is just highlighting that dates
> are a really bad way of deciding when a news item should expire, and
> that if we need anything, it's more Display-If conditions.
>
>
I rescind my patches; I'm fairly sure portage is broken and I don't really
relish fixing it; I've already spent more than 2 hours working on this and
this isn't worth spending more time on anyway.

-A



> --
> Ciaran McCreesh
>
>