Re: [gentoo-dev] GLEP 42 "Critical News Reporting" Round Two

[Lisa Seelye <lisa@gentoo.org>]

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On Sat, 2005-11-05 at 00:58 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> Feedback from people who have something useful to say would be very much
> welcomed, assuming of course that they've read the GLEP.


It is written in the GLEP (Requirements):

No user monitoring required
    It has already been demonstrated [#forums-whining]_ that many users
do not read news items posted to the Gentoo website, or do not read news
items until it is too late. A solution that relies upon active
monitoring of a particular source has no advantage over current methods.

And later in Specification->Overview:

5. Users fetch the news item when they sync. This ensures that the news
items in question are pushed to the user before the user accidentally
makes an unwanted change. No changes to the existing rsync process are
required by this GLEP.

My concerns are twofold:

The first is the method of delivery:  Through 'emerge sync', which
requires that users run this on a regular basis to receive relevant
news.  Further, this process can take a very long time and transfers a
relatively large amount of data along with the news.

My second concern is the frequency that users sync.  A stated concern is
getting news to users before it is too late.  Is there any way to gauge
the number of unique users which sync on a regular basis?  When is "too
late"?  Is there an acceptable window for delivering news?  It is not
uncommon for me to refrain from running emerge sync (or even cvs up on
the entire gentoo-x86 tree) for weeks or months on machines I wish to
keep somewhat static.

-- 
Regards,
Lisa Seelye
GPG: 09CF5 2D6B8 2B72B 997A7 601BC B46B5 561E4 96FC5
http://www.thedoh.com/~lisa/site

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