On Fri, 2009-04-03 at 13:59 -0400, Wyatt Epp wrote: > So while gearing up for the Summer of Code, I noted a lot of things > that I had come to accept as normal that I feel should not be so. > Things like the danger of depclean or the way portage will only show > one mask at a time. So I was curious...what have people that are not > myself and my mate noticed that is mildly irritating and disruptive to > the Gentoo experience? I have three ideas for improval:
1. == When updates hit the portage tree, that are known to cause problems to lots of people - why not tell that directly after the "--sync"? I can remember very well the e2fsprogs-thing, where you had to download the sources of the blocked package before uninstalling the blockers, because wget wouldn't work without the uninstalled libs! There were LOTS of people in forums and mailing lists asking for help. That could have been circumvented easily, if after "--sync" a message appeared, telling you to read /usr/portage/upgrading/12345-e2fsprogs.txt before upgrading e2fsprogs. The message should be displayed only, if the upgrade has not have been done (by checking for the existence of the old packages or new package). 2. == I'd like the ebuilds to be more verbose on possible problems, runtime dependencies, common errors and some nice hints would be great, too. Maybe this could be switched on/off by a VARIABLE, for those who feel annoyed. The app-office/openoffice-bin ebuild (at the end in pkg_postinst()) is a nice example of useful information. I know this cannot be solved technically - but I'd like to encourage all ebuild devs to be more verbose, as I think it improves user experience. 3. == The "q" family (app-portage/portage-utils) could have a new member that lists me all bugs from http://bugs.gentoo.org that belong to a certain package. Optionally, if a package fails to compile, this "qbug" could automatically make a lookup in the bugzilla-db, and list me all bugs that are known for the failed package (ID, Status and Summary from http://bugs.gentoo.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=e2fsprogs). I think something like: # wget 'http://bugs.gentoo.org/buglist.cgi?field-1-0-0=bug_status&field0-0-0=product&field0-0-1=component&field0-0-2=short_desc&field0-0-3=status_whiteboard&query_format=advanced&remaction=&type-1-0-0=anyexact&type0-0-0=substring&type0-0-1=substring&type0-0-2=substring&type0-0-3=substring&value-1-0-0=REOPENED%2CNEW%2CASSIGNED%2CUNCONFIRMED&value0-0-0=e2fsprogs&value0-0-1=e2fsprogs&value0-0-2=e2fsprogs&value0-0-3=e2fsprogs&ctype=csv' -O - | cut -d ',' -f1,6,8 sorted chronologically, and without the bug reports from last year. As this would be my first starting point anyway - why not automate it? Bye, Daniel -- PGP key @ http://pgpkeys.pca.dfn.de/pks/lookup?search=0xBB9D4887&op=get # gpg --recv-keys --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net 0xBB9D4887
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