Chris Gianelloni posted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, excerpted below, on Sat, 12 Nov 2005 10:26:08 -0500:
>> I hope that the technical solution will allow users to choose to see >> news about packages that are not installed - so that we can deliver news >> that isn't strictly package related, such as new Gentoo LiveCDs, or a >> Gentoo event, or so that we can deliver news where the package isn't yet >> in the tree (f.ex. announcing a new overlay, or Gentoo-hosted project). > > This is where I disagree with you completely. As a Gentoo user, I could > give a damn about a few developers getting together in the UK, and would > be pretty pissed off if Gentoo had this sort of garbage mixed in with > the critical information. This entire thing came about due to the need > to get *critical* information to our users. > > If users are interested in non-critical information, there's already a > mechanism in place for them to get such things. They can join the > mailing lists. Do we not already have a gentoo-events list? We also > have a gentoo-releng list, or gentoo-announce. Wow! No kidding! I too am off the (strong) opinion that those that /want/ social news and the like can already get it from GWN and the various lists. We do NOT need portage spamming us with non-critical announcements, or the channel will get so noisy folks will start ignoring it. BTW, I just had an experience that would have been a perfect match for critical news! I just merged the new glibc-2.3.6, over the 2.3.5.2005mmdd snapshot I was running due to the gcc4 fixes, and got clobbered over the head with portages's symlink bug! There's a message in red in the ebuild, that I happened to glance at just in time to see it move offscreen, but it said the problem was unsuccessful merges with current portage, which I took to mean /stable/ portage. No problem, I thought, I'm running ~arch, so it should be fine, and if it's not, it'll just break the emerge and I'll worry about it then. THE MESSAGE DIDN'T SAY IT WOULD MERGE JUST FINE, THEN ON THE OLD VERSION UNMERGE, WOULD PRETTY MUCH KILL MY SYSTEM!! =8^P Luckily I already had a couple mc sessions going, and having read the caution about doing symlinks in a single step when updating glibc, in O'Reilly's Running Linux, way back when I got serious about Linux and decided I was going to switch from MSWormOS, /and/ having caught just enough of the notice to get me thinking in that direction, I recognized the issue immediately, and was able to use the already running midnight commander instances to browse the portage database and restore enough symlinks manually, to be able to run bunzip2 again, and open up the binpkg (FEATURES=buildpkg) in mc's virtualfs and copy over the rest of the symlinks. Even if not, that's why I have snapshotted root dirs, so I could have rebooted into one of those to fix it. However, as I said, this would have made the /perfect/ candidate for a critical news warning! -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman in http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
