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

[Marius Mauch <genone@gentoo.org>]

On Sat, 5 Nov 2005 00:58:14 +0000
Ciaran McCreesh <ciaranm@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Feedback from people who have something useful to say would be very
> much welcomed, assuming of course that they've read the GLEP.

Things that I think are generally ok as is:
- news item format
- news item distribution (server side)

Things that I'd like to be changed/I'm not completely sure about:
- filtering of news items:
  I've already asked a similar question in another mail (in other
context) without an answer, but how many news items do people believe
will exist at any given time? Depending on the actual implementation it
might be required to scan all existing news items which could take some
time if there is a large number of them (say, more than a few hundred)
It's clear that noone can present accurate numbers, just after some
rough estimates here.
Also it might be useful for this filtering to be an external tool using
portage functions and called by portage (see also below). Although this
could be considered an implementation detail as it's mostly transparent
for ebuild devs/users.

- local storage of news items / "read" attribute:
  I don't really the like the copy-if-new feature and handling at the fs
level, I'd use a file that lists the ids of news items (potentially
with a timestamp and/or status field). I don't see any benefits of
having redundancy here, and accessing the news in $PORTDIR is simple
enough. Granted race conditions might be an issue (where the solution
complicates tools), but that's so minor I wouldn't really care about
it. 
Another thing that's unclear: "Whenever relevant unread news items are
found, emerge will copy or symlink the news file into
/var/lib/gentoo/news/." 
This "Whenever ... are found" is too vague, should this apply to emerge
--sync, any emerge operation, any "import portage" call or what? This
isn't just an implementation detail. 
PS: I'd avoid symlinks here at all costs, too easy to break them. 
Also as Brian and Jason have said already, the system should be able to
handle multiple repositories. So to use the current GLEP as example, at
least the path should be changed to /var/lib/gentoo/news/porttree

- quality control:
"Any complaints regarding wording or clarity must be addressed before
the news item goes live." Playing devils advocate here, but complaints
regarding correctness are not mandatory to be adressed?
As for using -core, please add a small explanation or at least a
reference to the appropriate policy docs (and please save the comments
about GuideXML uris ;)

Things that should definitely be changed:
- Integration with existing systems:
This definitely should be a requirement for the GLEP to be considered
final. It doesn't prevent some thing being implemented sooner than
others, but multi-channel distribution (to use a buzzword) is a
requirement from where I come from.

Marius

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