On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 3:32 PM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> wrote: > Apparently, though unproven, at 23:39 on Tuesday 07 June 2011, Mark Knecht did > opine thusly: > >> I have no problem with saying someone needs to understand what less >> does. less isn't important. It's just the example at hand today. The >> 'problem' that I'm trying to get closer to answering is how does >> anyone other than a Gentoo dev, assuming some reasonable amount of >> effort, know that less isn't called by some script somewhere during >> the init process? How does one come to understand that maybe less is >> just as import as python is to the emerge process? (and I know it >> isn't...) >> >> What I didn't like about this issue popping up yesterday is that it >> altered the idea that average users never touch anything in @system. >> Iin fact, TTBOMK I've never in 11 or 12 years of running Gentoo ever >> done an emerge -C on a @system package until this morning when I >> removed nano. > > OK, now we're tracking. >
Good. > In the specific case of less, the answer is self-evident - it isn't needed. A > dev would just know that. More likely, he would assume he knows that. > > In the general case, they suck their thumbs and guess. Some think more than > others before they guess, they should all do some basic tests to catch severe > errors before committing changes and additions, and all of them rely on > unstable users finding other oddities and bugs. > > flameeyes gave some hints and clues into how this works on his blog recently: > > http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2011/05/25/psa-packages-failing-to-install-with-new- > openrc-based-stages-missing-users-and-groups > > It's specific to openrc, but if you follow his blog it's easy to read between > the lines to see what he's getting at usually. > > I don't think I've ever met a dev that releases code any other way :-) > > None of the above is fact and all of it is my opinion but I do think I'm close > to the mark. Thanks for the link. It looks interesting. Cheers, Mark
