Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: "b.n." <brullonulla@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Announcement of tricky upgrades & stuff [was: lyx & texlive]
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:43:30
Message-Id: 4818CE31.8020802@gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] lyx & texlive by Willie Wong
1 Willie Wong ha scritto:
2 > On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 08:33:04PM +0200, b.n. wrote:
3 >> ehm, I guess I wasn't clear.
4 >> You *already* knew:
5 >> - That there are texlive and tetex
6 >> - That tetex was EOLed and texlive was the next choice
7 >> - That tetex and texlive are mutually exclusive
8 >> - That the ebuild was in the tree
9 >
10 > Oh.. that...
11
12 Yes I know. People's ignorance is amazing, isn't it? :)
13
14 > tetex was not running into problems. tetex has almost always been a
15 > one man act, and the maintainer, who, after over a decade of
16 > maintaining bug fixes and what-nots, finally decided that he has no
17 > more time and no longer cares enough. And he pulled through until a
18 > viable alternative was available.
19
20 Well, that's among what I call "running into problems". Having a
21 software you rely upon being discontinued is not nice.
22
23 >> - Knowing nothing about what tetex, texlive etc. are, I even could
24 >> expect that they could happily live together (e.g., if they are two
25 >> implementations of tex, that one could eselect one or the other. Naive,
26 >> but why not?)
27 >> - Knowing nothing about texlive, I couldn't know there was its ebuild.
28 >
29 > The best thing to do would be to ask here, I think. Of course, that
30 > leads to the problem of you not knowing that a question ought to be
31 > asked to start with...
32
33 Yes, that's exactly the trouble. Once I know there is a question, I can
34 google it myself, asking on forums and MLs, etc. But how I know?
35
36 > Let's just say I have an exceptionally good memory. The death of tetex
37 > was announced about two years ago
38 > http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20060612-newsletter.xml
39 > and I know I also saw that fact somewhere on /. (perhaps not an
40 > article but a comment). After I saw the announcements, I went to
41 > http://www.tug.org/tetex/
42 > where, the first thing they (I mean, Thomas Esser) say is that "I
43 > suggest ... TeX Live project".
44
45 I was to say "ok, it was on gwn, my fault", when I read:
46
47 "Tetex changes
48
49 Tetex's upstream maintainer Thomas Esser hass announced that he won't
50 make any further tetex releases. This will have some mid- to long-term
51 effects on how tetex is maintained in Gentoo. Gentoo developer Martin
52 Ehmsen shows the possible methods for handling this – while it seems to
53 be undecided for now how to proceed there will be changes in the future.
54 Stay tuned… "
55
56 It basically doesn't say "you better upgrade to texlive before tetex
57 goes in the /dev/null department". It says "well, tetex maintainer steps
58 down." That's very much different -someone could have stepped in and
59 replaced Esser. It is alarming, my fault for having missed it, but not
60 nearly as much as what I'd expect. Most importantly, no link at all was
61 posted for a migration guide.
62
63 What I'd expect is gentoo-announce to shout loud things like "Attention,
64 please! People using tetex should consider upgrading to texlive unless
65 their very own life depends on texlive! The migration guide is there
66 [link]. Problems should be reported here,here and here." Possibly with
67 repeated announcements: one for ~arch people ("hey, this is beginning to
68 be pushed in testing,report here..."),so that also arch people can
69 prepare, and then repeat it for the arch people, when it's time.
70
71 I've very seldomly seen stuff like that. I am now checking my
72 gentoo-announce folder on thunderbird, and in 2 years I find only
73 something about PHP4 being masked, apart from GLSA stuff. Shouldn't
74 gentoo-announce serve the purpose of announcing stuff like texlive,
75 expat upgrade, gcc/glibc upgrades, the upcoming baselayout-2 thing (that
76 from posts here looks like a potential storm of s**t for the unwary),
77 etc.? If it's not gentoo-announce, what is the right place?
78
79 Following this ML helps, following GMN too (I'll read it more carefully)
80 but I'd like something "official" and granular like a mailing list about
81 that.
82
83 m.
84
85 --
86 gentoo-user@l.g.o mailing list

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] Announcement of tricky upgrades & stuff [was: lyx & texlive] Willie Wong <wwong@×××××××××.EDU>