Re: [gentoo-dev] GLEP 42 news item for review: Radiant upgrade

[Hans de Graaff <graaff@gentoo.org>]

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On Sun, 2007-05-06 at 16:51 +0100, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:

> > Will the news item be shown before or after the package gets merged?
> 
> After. For before, use Display-If-Installed: on a lower version.

Ok, so this is more like elog stuff. One benefit I can see with this
version is that it makes it easier to version the messages. Some ebuilds
currently in the tree have many messages, all tied to different upgrade
paths and it's hard to make out which ones are relevant. This can be
solved with elog by more carefully wording the messages and always
include version numbers, but even then the user has to parse things.

And you were right, this is not what I'm after.

> > I'm afraid that this is not correct, because the semantics of
> > Display-If-Installed don't match the use case I described.
> > Specifically, it will cause the news item to be shown way to early
> > for users on a stable profile.
> 
> Thus giving them lots of notice, which is one of the things the GLEP
> was designed to do.
> 

I'm afraid that many users will have forgotten by the time the upgrade
is actually possible for them, especially when this period is longer
than a month. It feels a bit like crying wolf to me: "here's a bunch of
changes you'll need to deal with at some point on the future, but you
can't have them now and we don't know when they'll be ready, and if they
are ready we won't warn you again"

To me it seems to make more sense to show the message when the upgrade
it actually available. Then the user can decide if this is the right
time to tackle the issue and get at it right away, or wait until a later
time.

Kind regards,

Hans

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