Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: GLEP 42 (Was: Getting Important Updates To Users)

[Jason Stubbs <jstubbs@gentoo.org>]

On Tuesday 08 November 2005 01:06, Grant Goodyear wrote:
> Jason Stubbs wrote: [Mon Nov 07 2005, 06:37:10AM CST]
> > I'm really just against having it in emerge, especially with the current
> > suggestion of portage just doing a little bit of maintenance work for
> > external tools and nothing else.
>
> I'm not sure exactly what you're arguing here.  Is it just that you
> think that the news stuff should be a post-sync hook instead of being
> triggered explicitly by "emerge"?

I just wrote several paragraphs but that got me thinking so I deleted 'em.

Ok. There's two levels of APIs here. There's the post-sync stuff which 
utilizes portage's API. There'll never be any need for portage to utilize the 
post-sync stuff that I can think of; if there is, that's a reason for putting 
it into portage. The second layer is between the post-sync stuff and the news 
readers. Here we have a problem.

As Brian mentioned, multiple independent repositories will be supported and 
each should be allowed to have it's own independent set of news items. 
Multiple repositories will bring new (or completely replace) portage APIs. 
Hence, the post-sync stuff will have to accomodate. Yet, that's going to 
propogate into the post-sync component's API provided for the readers.

Multiple independent repositories is just one change that we know is going to 
throw a spanner in the works. There'll likely be others. Hmm, I think I've 
just discovered what's unsettling about all this. We're being asked to throw 
something into portage that'll do XYZ to support external tools, yet we are 
guaranteed to break the XYZ.

I guess I'd be happy with portage doing it and responsibility for 
compatibility staying with portage as long as we can decide/lead how the 
external tools gains access to the information.

--
Jason Stubbs
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