GLEP: 42 Title: Critical News Reporting Version: $Revision: $ Author: Ciaran McCreesh Last-Modified: $Date: $ Status: Draft Type: Standards Track Content-Type: text/x-rst Created: 31-October-2005 Post-Date: 1-November-2005, 5-November-2005 Abstract ======== This GLEP proposes a new way of informing users about important updates and news regarding tree-related items. Motivation ========== There are currently several ways of getting news out to our users, none of them particularly effective: * Gentoo Weekly News * The ``gentoo-announce`` mailing list * The Gentoo Forums * The main Gentoo website * RSS feeds of Gentoo news A more reliable way of getting news of critical updates out to users is required to avoid repeats of the various recent upgrade debacles. This GLEP proposes a solution based around pushing news items out to the user via the ``rsync`` tree. Requirements ============ An adequate solution must meet all of the following requirements: Preemptive Users should be told of changes *before* they break the user's system, after the damage has already been done. No user subscription required It has already been demonstrated [#forums-whining]_ that many users do not read the ``gentoo-announce`` mailing list or ``RSS`` feeds. A solution which requires subscription has no advantage over current methods. 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. Relevant System administrators who do not use a particular package should not have to read news items which affect purely that package. Some news items may be of relevance to most or all users, but those that are not should not be forced upon users unnecessarily. Lightweight It is not reasonable to expect all users to have an MTA, web browser, email client, cron daemon or text processing suite available on their system. No privacy violations Users of the solution should not be required to provide information about their systems (for example, IP addresses or installed packages). Multiple delivery method support Some users may wish to view news items via email, some via a terminal and some via a web browser. A solution should either support all of these methods or (better still) make it trivial to write clients for displaying news items in different ways. The following characteristics would be desirable: Internationalisable Being able to provide messages in multiple languages may be beneficial. Quality control There should be some way to ensure that badly written or irrelevant messages are not sent out, for example by inexperienced developers, those whose English language skills are below par or morons. Simple for developers Posting news items should be as simple as is reasonably possible. Simple for users Reading relevant news items should be as simple as is reasonably possible. Compatibility with existing and future news sources A news system would ideally be able to be integrated with existing news sources (for example, Forums, GWN, the main Gentoo website) without excessive difficulty. Similarly, easy interoperation with any future news sources should not be precluded. Specification ============= Overview -------- News items are published and delivered to users as follows: 1. A news item is written. The format to be used is described in `News Item File Format`_. 2. The news item is reviewed, following the process described in `News Item Quality Control`_. 3. The news item is committed to a CVS (or Subversion [#glep-36]_) repository. From here, it is merged with the rsync tree. This is described in `News Item Distribution`_. 4. The news item is merged with the rsync tree. Implementation details of this point are beyond the scope of this GLEP; existing solutions are in place for merging GLSAs to the tree. 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. 6. Portage filters the news item and, if it is relevant, installs it in a special location to be read by a news item reader. Messages are also displayed to inform the user that news is available. 7. The news item is handled by the user's choice of news item reader. See `News Item Clients`_. News Item File Format --------------------- Each news item will be represented by a single text file. This file will be encoded using UTF-8 for compatibility with and for the same reason as existing Gentoo documentation [#docs-policy]_ and tree [#glep-31]_ practices. The news item will be named in the form ``yyyy-mm-dd-item-name.en.txt``, where ``item-name`` is a very short name (e.g. ``apache-updates``) and ``en`` is the two letter ISO 639 [#iso-639]_ language code for the news item. The short name must consist only of characters ``a-z``, ``A-Z``, ``0-9`` and ``-`` (hyphen). News items may be signed using GPG. If this is done, a detached signature should be used. The directory and file name rules are designed specifically to allow easy sorting by date. An English (``en``) version must be available for all news items. Other languages may be provided either by the original author or by other translators who have commit access. This anglocentricity is justified on the grounds that nobody objected to it with GLEP 34 [#glep-34]_. A news item's content will consist of an RFC 822 [#rfc-822]_ style header followed by the main body of the message as plain text. This GLEP defines various optional and mandatory headers. Future GLEPs may propose new headers -- tools handling these news items must ignore any unrecognised header. News Item Headers ''''''''''''''''' The following headers describe the purpose and format of the news item: ``Title:`` A short (maximum 44 characters) descriptive title. Mandatory. ``Author:`` Author's name and email address, in the form ``Real Name ``. Mandatory, multiple author fields may be specified if appropriate. ``Translator:`` For translated news items, the translator's name and email address. ``Content-Type:`` Must be ``text/plain``. Mandatory. ``Posted:`` Date of posting, in ``dd-mmm-yyyy`` format (e.g. 14-Aug-2001). UTC time in ``hh-mm-ss +0000`` format may also be included. This field is mandatory. ``Version:`` Initially 1. Incremented every time a non-trivial change is made. Changes which require a re-read of the news item should instead use a new news item file. ``News-Item-Format:`` Must be ``1.0``. Future revisions to the format may increment the minor number for backwards-compatible changes, or the major number for major changes. The following headers are used for filtering. If none of these headers are specified, the news item is displayed for all users. Otherwise, the news item is displayed if *at least one* header matches. ``Display-If-Installed:`` A dependency atom or simple package name (for example, `` Content-Type: text/plain Posted: 01-Nov-2005 Display-If-Installed: