From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org ([69.77.167.62] helo=lists.gentoo.org) by finch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1L6p7M-0004Yi-MB for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Sun, 30 Nov 2008 16:25:56 +0000 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 0255AE062C; Sun, 30 Nov 2008 16:25:55 +0000 (UTC) Received: from smtp.gentoo.org (smtp.gentoo.org [140.211.166.183]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D1FE5E062C for ; Sun, 30 Nov 2008 16:25:54 +0000 (UTC) Received: from [67.40.138.82] (crater.wildlava.net [67.40.138.82]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by smtp.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 36F5F643CD for ; Sun, 30 Nov 2008 16:25:54 +0000 (UTC) Message-ID: <4932BE8F.6030000@gentoo.org> Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 09:25:51 -0700 From: Joe Peterson User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.18 (X11/20081127) Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 To: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org Subject: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Saving package emerge output (einfo, elog, ewarn, etc.) somewhere official Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Archives-Salt: 4b5b37a6-2a57-4a26-9874-228561023b23 X-Archives-Hash: f7b4889017312bb646d342de710d7981 I recently had a user write to me after banging his head against the wall for a while, trying to get a package working. By the time he wrote me, he had already figured it out, but he wanted to convey to me that what finally helped was actually the emerge output (which stated exactly how to get things working - in this case, the need to run emerge --config). He had not noticed this before and only saw it upon re-installing, given the transient nature of the emerge messages. Bottom line here is that there is extremely valuable and critical info in our emerge output. In a way, these messages are like Gentoo-specific READMEs (or release notes and/or install instructions). However, it is not saved for a user to use as a resource later (well, except that it is partially saved in the master emerge.log, but that's not quite useful enough). There is no "official" place to go to look for Gentoo instructions; /usr/share/doc is one logical place, but it only contains files actually installed, not the notes output by emerge (and these are usually upstream-supplied, not Gentoo). I propose that, upon merging a package, we save the emerge messages in either: 1) a package-specific file that resides somewhere "official" or 2) in the portage DB, so that the messages can be re-read via a portage utility. In the latter case, either a new option to "equery" or a new "q" command (e.g. "equery readme " or "qreadme " could retrieve the text). In either case, there would then be a place to go that is known and consistent (and can be documented in the Gentoo doc). It could, in essense, serve as a kind of "Gentoo package README" collection. I could also imagine later expanding on this by letting a given package also include more thorough README info from a file if the maintainer so desires. -Joe