Re: [gentoo-dev] GLEP 42 "Critical News Reporting" Round Two

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Fri, 11 Nov 2005 18:40:53 +0100 Marius Mauch <genone@g.o>
wrote:
|   I've already asked a similar question in another mail (in other
| context) without an answer, but how many news items do people believe
| will exist at any given time? Depending on the actual implementation
| it might be required to scan all existing news items which could take
| some time if there is a large number of them (say, more than a few
| hundred) It's clear that noone can present accurate numbers, just
| after some rough estimates here.

I don't expect it to be of the order of a few hundred. AFAIK there
aren't huge numbers of nasty upgrades...

| Also it might be useful for this filtering to be an external tool
| using portage functions and called by portage (see also below).
| Although this could be considered an implementation detail as it's
| mostly transparent for ebuild devs/users.

Yeah, I have a script which does it already. It's just rather slow
because of portageq. It'll be in the next draft.

| - local storage of news items / "read" attribute:
|   I don't really the like the copy-if-new feature and handling at the
| fs level, I'd use a file that lists the ids of news items (potentially
| with a timestamp and/or status field). I don't see any benefits of
| having redundancy here, and accessing the news in $PORTDIR is simple
| enough. Granted race conditions might be an issue (where the solution
| complicates tools), but that's so minor I wouldn't really care about
| it.

I'll have to think about that one... ID lists should be easy from an
implementation perspective...

| Another thing that's unclear: "Whenever relevant unread news items are
| found, emerge will copy or symlink the news file into
| /var/lib/gentoo/news/." 
| This "Whenever ... are found" is too vague, should this apply to
| emerge --sync, any emerge operation, any "import portage" call or
| what? This isn't just an implementation detail. 

I'd say after emerge --sync, plus after an emerge --pretend and before
an emerge blah. Will there be hooks for these?

| PS: I'd avoid symlinks here at all costs, too easy to break them. 

Probably true, especially if portdir changes...

| Also as Brian and Jason have said already, the system should be able
| to handle multiple repositories. So to use the current GLEP as
| example, at least the path should be changed
| to /var/lib/gentoo/news/porttree

Pfff, if that ever happens it's just a case of adding in another
directory level. As it stands though, there's no multiple repo support
in portage and no way to uniquely identify a repo, so I see no point in
going out of the way to handle something which may or may not ever
happen.


| - quality control:
| "Any complaints regarding wording or clarity must be addressed before
| the news item goes live." Playing devils advocate here, but complaints
| regarding correctness are not mandatory to be adressed?

Mmm, guess I should change that to "Any complaints (including, without
prejudice to the aforesaid generality, those of wording, clarity or
correctness) must ...".

| As for using -core, please add a small explanation or at least a
| reference to the appropriate policy docs

I've moved the -core stuff to a .. Note:: for the next draft.

| Things that should definitely be changed:
| - Integration with existing systems:
| This definitely should be a requirement for the GLEP to be considered
| final. It doesn't prevent some thing being implemented sooner than
| others, but multi-channel distribution (to use a buzzword) is a
| requirement from where I come from.

I'd really rather that news.gentoo.org / news2announceemail / whatever
were handled via separate GLEPs. 42 is fairly long as it is...

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Look! Shiny things!)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm