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

[Jason Stubbs <jstubbs@gentoo.org>]

On Sunday 13 November 2005 00:34, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-11-12 at 13:39 +0900, Jason Stubbs wrote:
> > On Saturday 12 November 2005 07:19, Stuart Herbert wrote:
> > > When we have emerge --news done,
> >
> > I keep seeing references to "emerge --news" but at the same time am
> > seeing that news readers are external. What exactly is `emerge --news`
> > meant to do? Print out "You've got news!"? Manage some external database?
>
> It is my opinion that the news reading application need not be
> integrated into portage.  As far as I have understood it, the only real
> thing that anyone has required portage itself to do is to
> *automatically* spit out "You have $n unread news messages.  Please use
> $bleh to read them" at certain times (after sync, after --pretend,
> before/after a merge).  I don't see this as being something very
> complex.  I would assume that some extra code would need to be written
> into the sync code somewhere to sort the messages.

This, I get. What I'm wondering about is the `emerge --news` that is referred 
to every so often.

> I wouldn't mind seeing something along the lines of /var/db/news
> directory (or something repo specific, whatever) that has a pretty
> simple format...
>
> yyyy-mm-dd-$blah-$lang.txt.unread
> yyyy-mm-dd-$blah-$lang.txt.read
>
> When you delete a message, it is gone.  This means an external news
> reader (enews anyone?) that basically has the capability to read, skip,
> or delete these news items.
>
> I think this would be pretty simple to get done and covers the problem
> of messages being read or unread.  Of course, this is all just an idea,
> so feel free to blow holes all in it.  ;]

To be honest, this is the part that I don't like the most. Integrating code 
into portage to copy files here and there based on some predefined rules and 
news readers reading and renaming files based on some predefined rules...
A filesystem based API just doesn't seem very robust to change.

I'd prefer that either the post-sync handling code is not integrated into 
portage and portage just triggers some external script - or - portage exposes 
an API (via python and bash) for accessing and updating news items. I'd 
prefer the latter but I get the impression that most prefer the former.

--
Jason Stubbs
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