Re: [gentoo-user] ncurses: reductio ad absurdum

[Marc Joliet]

Am Fri, 28 Aug 2015 06:19:20 -0700
schrieb walt <w41ter@×××××.com>:

> I avoided yesterday's downgrade from ncurses-6.0 to ncurses-5.9-r4
> because it was obviously(?) a mistake.
>
> This morning I just upgraded(?) ncurses-6.0 to ncurses-6.0-r1 and
> immediately after doing that, portage wants to downgrade(?) from
> 6.0-r1 back to 6.0.
>
> This comedy of errors would be funny if it weren't emblematic of the
> larger and very scary problem we all face in real life:  computers now
> dominate every aspect of everything we do and what is expected of us by
> our employers, friends, family, and our government.  (I refer to the
> government here in the US.  Your government may vary.)

Yeah, this hasn't exactly been the smoothest change :-/ .

> Note that /usr/portage/sys-libs/ncurses/Changelog was last updated on
> April 6, several months ago.

That is an artifact of the git migration.  I believe it is being worked on.

> Rhetorical question:  what is the purpose of a Changelog?  Or any log,
> anywhere, like the captain's log on an oil tanker, for example, or an
> airliner, or in the IT department of the bank where your life savings
> are stored.  Who last rebooted that server, and why?
>
> Who last updated ncurses, and why?  Yes, I looked at the ebuild, which
> cites a bug report, which may or may not serve as the log I'm asking
> for, but doesn't this all seem too complicated to work smoothly for
> years without frequent fsck-ups?
[...]

You can try the gitweb interface, for example like this:
https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/log/?qt=grep&q=ncurses.

HTH
-- 
Marc Joliet
--
"People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we
don't" - Bjarne Stroustrup