Jason Stubbs wrote:
On Friday 04 November 2005 23:26, Xavier Neys wrote:
Nathan L. Adams wrote:
One source: http://errata.gentoo.org/
Push that out to as many alternate sources as you like (RSS feeds,
summaries in emerge --news, forums post, etc.), but make it known that
the website is *the* source (your alternate sources should point back to
it).
I beg to differ. The tree should be the central point because it's the only
known place where all users can receive relevant information on and for
each and every system they maintain right before they upgrade.
The warning and the logic that triggers its display should be part of
Portage. Sometimes, all that would need to be displayed is "run foo to fix
bar" or "Please do read http://bleh _before_ you upgrade foo".
If an "Upgrade guide to foo/bar for Gentoo" is required, you need an author
to write it, not extra code or an extra web site.
I probably shouldn't have included the sarcastic comment in my only other
reply to this thread, but the rest of it was completely serious. People are
under the mistaken impression that the ebuild tree is required to use
portage. This is wrong and will become more and more wrong as time goes by.
If there is not a specific need for this news stuff to go into the tree then
it shouldn't be there. If there is a specific need (ie. it is tied to
packages) what difference is there to the existing ChangeLog?
--
Jason Stubbs
I am going to summarize a bit, and address your point.
Summary: people want small news tidbits to be distributed to all users.
Currently the suggestion is tree-based. Portage should have code to
detect news elements after a sync and copy relevant elements to a uesr
specified news directory. The news should be in a human readable format
(XML, RST, pig latin, don't care at this point see below). Portage
should post-sync, print a message noting the number of unread but
relevant news messages. Users can use whatever means of reading them
that they like. IMHO, emerge --news can go to hell in a handbasket, I'd
rather just friggin use less, but hey, if you write the code...
News messages should contain minimal information necessary to carry
relevant information including affected packages, and a link to some
sort of documentation, be it gentoo-wiki, or official package docs, or
whatever.
For those without internet access 24/7, there may be an option required
to fetch these links. In the case of say, dial-up where someone only
has network say, 4 hours a day, they may wish to sync their tree, and
spider the docs links so they may view them locally. Machines with no
outside network ( internal production servers ) may also wish to make
use of this. In the case of online guides, we cannot necessarily define
their content, it may be XML, it may be plain text. I do not see how
conceeding that a user may need a web browser SOMEWHERE, is that big of
a tradeoff, especially if the content is already locally available.
As far as including news in the tree goes, news is repository bound
information. Each repository may in fact have relevant news, and in
preparation for multiple repositories this is how the news should be
handled. It goes with the rest of the repo-specific information. That
is why it should be in the tree.
However, in the case of a remote tree, some extra API calls may be
required. However, it is up to the class implementor to implement those
calls, not the original portage team ( unless you want to support remote
trees yourself, in which case that duty falls to you ). The only other
thing was no tree but a binpkg repo, in which case in savior, binpkg
repo should have news elements build in ( a repo, just all built
packages ). In stable, news should probably be added to the binpackage
if it's listed in the packages-affected.
For the XML vs RST. I personally don't want to read XML files in a
console, or install anything that makes it look all pretty for me, RST
is plenty good enough. Since Ciaran has graciously written all the code
for it already, I don't see any reason not to use it. RST is pretty
simple to migrate to a new format anyhow, and a converter could be
easily whipped up to transform it to guideXMl for errate.g.o if that is
what is desired ( not a bad idea IMHO ).
I forgot one other thing, that being perhaps a red NEWS that shows up
next to affected packages during an emerge -pv <package>, informing you
that important news is available for a package you are about to install.
So yeah, this is a long thread :0
Alec Warner (Antarus)
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