[gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[Samuli Suominen]

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I find this useless at this time because the work is in-progress, but in
order to silence the loud minority,
please review the news item.

Thanks!

- Samuli



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Title: UPower discontinued hibernate/suspend support
Author: Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@gentoo.org>
Content-Type: text/plain
Posted: 2014-06-03
Revision: 1
News-Item-Format: 1.0
Display-If-Installed: <sys-power/upower-0.99.0

UPower discontinued hibernate and suspend support in favor of systemd.
Because of this, we have created a compability package at
sys-power/upower-pm-utils which will give you the old UPower with
sys-power/pm-utils support back.
Some desktops have integrated the sys-power/pm-utils support directly
to their code, like Xfce, and as a result, they work also with the new
UPower as expected.

All users are recommended to choose between:

# emerge --noreplace 'sys-power/upower-pm-utils'

or

# emerge --noreplace '>=sys-power/upower-0.99.0'

Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[Samuli Suominen]

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On 03/06/14 18:43, Samuli Suominen wrote:
> I find this useless at this time because the work is in-progress, but in
> order to silence the loud minority,
> please review the news item.
>
> Thanks!
>
> - Samuli
>
>

Added a line, exception for systemd users

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Title: UPower discontinued hibernate/suspend support
Author: Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@gentoo.org>
Content-Type: text/plain
Posted: 2014-06-03
Revision: 1
News-Item-Format: 1.0
Display-If-Installed: <sys-power/upower-0.99.0

UPower discontinued hibernate and suspend support in favor of systemd.
Because of this, we have created a compability package at
sys-power/upower-pm-utils which will give you the old UPower with
sys-power/pm-utils support back.
Some desktops have integrated the sys-power/pm-utils support directly
to their code, like Xfce, and as a result, they work also with the new
UPower as expected.

All non-systemd users are recommended to choose between:

# emerge --noreplace 'sys-power/upower-pm-utils'

or

# emerge --noreplace '>=sys-power/upower-0.99.0'

However, all systemd users are recommended to stay with sys-power/upower.

Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[Steev Klimaszewski]

On Tue, 2014-06-03 at 18:43 +0300, Samuli Suominen wrote:
> I find this useless at this time because the work is in-progress, but in
> order to silence the loud minority,
> please review the news item.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> - Samuli
> 
> 

I appreciate your work on this - and you may call them the loud minority
- but this could definitely have been handled better.  Instead of
viewing their complaints as an annoyance, view it as a learning point to
possibly realize that you're affecting a lot of desktops and people's
updates are suddenly stopping.  I realize that this was mentioned in the
GWN, but not everyone subscribes to every possible news outlet for
Gentoo even if they use Gentoo, and the only one that is "guaranteed" to
get to them is a portage checkout, which is why news items are good,
especially when something like this occurs.  Instead of belittling the
users because they are wasting so much of your time, try to empathize
with them a bit and realize that they are running into an actual issue
that could have been avoided easily with this news item.

That said, the news item looks good to me, and yeah it may be a bit late
now since this already happened.

Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[Tom Wijsman]

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On Tue, 03 Jun 2014 18:53:26 +0300
Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Title: UPower discontinued hibernate/suspend support

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GLEP:42#News_Item_Headers

You're going to hate me for mentioning this, but that is one character
too much; 45 > 44 characters. Besides that, I think it would be nice if
this could indicate systemd somehow.

Some suggestions to brainstorm further:

    Title: UPower loses hibernate / suspend to systemd
    Title: UPower loses suspension to systemd, new fork
    Title: UPower's suspend in systemd or pm-utils fork

(As systemd user, I'm not intending to give it a negative feeling)

> Author: Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@gentoo.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain
> Posted: 2014-06-03
> Revision: 1
> News-Item-Format: 1.0
> Display-If-Installed: <sys-power/upower-0.99.0
> 
> UPower discontinued hibernate and suspend support in favor of systemd.
> Because of this, we have created a compability package at
> sys-power/upower-pm-utils which will give you the old UPower with
> sys-power/pm-utils support back.
> Some desktops have integrated the sys-power/pm-utils support directly
> to their code, like Xfce, and as a result, they work also with the new
> UPower as expected.
> 
> All non-systemd users are recommended to choose between:
> 
> # emerge --noreplace 'sys-power/upower-pm-utils'
> 
> or
> 
> # emerge --noreplace '>=sys-power/upower-0.99.0'
> 
> However, all systemd users are recommended to stay with
> sys-power/upower.

The rest of the news item looks good to me.

-- 
With kind regards,

Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
Gentoo Developer

E-mail address  : TomWij@gentoo.org
GPG Public Key  : 6D34E57D
GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2  ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D

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Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[Samuli Suominen]

On 03/06/14 19:26, Tom Wijsman wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Jun 2014 18:53:26 +0300
> Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
>> Title: UPower discontinued hibernate/suspend support
> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GLEP:42#News_Item_Headers
>
> You're going to hate me for mentioning this, but that is one character
> too much; 45 > 44 characters. Besides that, I think it would be nice if
> this could indicate systemd somehow.
>
> Some suggestions to brainstorm further:
>
>     Title: UPower loses hibernate / suspend to systemd

This works.

>     Title: UPower loses suspension to systemd, new fork
>     Title: UPower's suspend in systemd or pm-utils fork

I don't want to call it a "fork" just yet.   Albeit, I'm sure it will
evolve into one.

Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[Samuli Suominen]

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On 03/06/14 18:43, Samuli Suominen wrote:
> I find this useless at this time because the work is in-progress, but in
> order to silence the loud minority,
> please review the news item.
>
> Thanks!
>
> - Samuli
>
>

Will commit this tonight, unless someone has more

- Samuli

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Title: UPower loses hibernate / suspend to systemd
Author: Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@gentoo.org>
Content-Type: text/plain
Posted: 2014-06-03
Revision: 1
News-Item-Format: 1.0
Display-If-Installed: <sys-power/upower-0.99.0

UPower discontinued hibernate and suspend support in favor of systemd.
Because of this, we have created a compability package at
sys-power/upower-pm-utils which will give you the old UPower with
sys-power/pm-utils support back.
Some desktops have integrated the sys-power/pm-utils support directly
to their code, like Xfce, and as a result, they work also with the new
UPower as expected.

All non-systemd users are recommended to choose between:

# emerge --oneshot --noreplace 'sys-power/upower-pm-utils'

or

# emerge --oneshot --noreplace '>=sys-power/upower-0.99.0'

However, all systemd users are recommended to stay with sys-power/upower.

Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[Peter Stuge]

Steev Klimaszewski wrote:
> Instead of belittling the users because they are wasting so much of
> your time

Causing a rougher transition than neccessary is a waste of users' time.

I don't think that's awesome.


//Peter

Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[Samuli Suominen]

On 03/06/14 21:58, Peter Stuge wrote:
> Steev Klimaszewski wrote:
>> Instead of belittling the users because they are wasting so much of
>> your time
> Causing a rougher transition than neccessary is a waste of users' time.
>
> I don't think that's awesome.
>
>
> //Peter
>

I still don't understand how the news item helps anything, it's all
matter of running
one command, or two at most, `eix upower` after seeing blockers, seeing
2 different
options, selecting which one to go with, emerging it
I'd say such handholding distracts real admins from the real news items
that actually
require paying attention :/

- Samuli

Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[Alan McKinnon]

On 03/06/2014 21:50, Samuli Suominen wrote:
> 
> On 03/06/14 21:58, Peter Stuge wrote:
>> Steev Klimaszewski wrote:
>>> Instead of belittling the users because they are wasting so much of
>>> your time
>> Causing a rougher transition than neccessary is a waste of users' time.
>>
>> I don't think that's awesome.
>>
>>
>> //Peter
>>
> 
> I still don't understand how the news item helps anything, it's all
> matter of running
> one command, or two at most, `eix upower` after seeing blockers, seeing
> 2 different
> options, selecting which one to go with, emerging it
> I'd say such handholding distracts real admins from the real news items
> that actually
> require paying attention :/



Yes, it *is* a simple matter of running one easy command. Portage does
that for you with trivial ease. But portage doesn't tell you *which* is
the one easy command.

A news item does that.


Please realise that groking Portage's output takes considerable skill,
understanding and familiarity with the scene. It's much easier when you
know what will be printed before you run it - perhaps you are in that
position?

I've been using Gentoo for 10 years and portage still baffles me more
often than it should. I resort to reading the ebuild to figure it out.
Funny thing is, portage has the same information available as I do so
why doesn't it print more human-friendly output? At least we got past
that "satisfied by no parents in slot" stuff and now we have cute carets
that point to stuff like some compilers.

The point is, human communication is vastly more powerful than machine
communication in cases like these, and a news item fits the bill
perfectly. There are still 1000s of users out there who haven't run
across this upower stumble yet, a news item will help them a lot and
will be very well accepted (aka Samuli gets brownie points from user for
caring)


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com

Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[Tom Wijsman]

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On Tue, 03 Jun 2014 22:24:11 +0200
Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:

> The point is, human communication is vastly more powerful

+1

It might not be clear in the moment, because it looks like a ton of
bikeshedding and other ways some individuals would label this; but it
will be useful some time from now, when it leads to useful results.

Having some people talk about things on a chat, forum, blog, ... might
have a short lived effect now with an occasional spike in the future;
but, a news item reaches a much wider public for a much longer item.

Let's say someone upgrades his system in some weeks / months from now,
that person will be thankful that a news item was written about this;
instead of having this be part of the already though job of updating.

Of course, there is a thing like "too much handholding" but I think
that's not the case here as the upower case pops up in a lot of places;
one does not have to forget that there is also "too little handholding".

If it weren't for genkernel or a kernel seed to help me start out with
a booting system, I perhaps might have never started using Gentoo; I've
afterwards managed to change my config over time to look nowhere near
the original, but at least it makes me happy to have experienced the
handholding to bring me where I am today. These "little things" matter.

-- 
With kind regards,

Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
Gentoo Developer

E-mail address  : TomWij@gentoo.org
GPG Public Key  : 6D34E57D
GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2  ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D

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Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[Alan McKinnon]

On 04/06/2014 00:32, Tom Wijsman wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Jun 2014 22:24:11 +0200
> Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> The point is, human communication is vastly more powerful
> 
> +1
> 
> It might not be clear in the moment, because it looks like a ton of
> bikeshedding and other ways some individuals would label this; but it
> will be useful some time from now, when it leads to useful results.
> 
> Having some people talk about things on a chat, forum, blog, ... might
> have a short lived effect now with an occasional spike in the future;
> but, a news item reaches a much wider public for a much longer item.
> 
> Let's say someone upgrades his system in some weeks / months from now,
> that person will be thankful that a news item was written about this;
> instead of having this be part of the already though job of updating.
> 
> Of course, there is a thing like "too much handholding" but I think
> that's not the case here as the upower case pops up in a lot of places;
> one does not have to forget that there is also "too little handholding".
> 
> If it weren't for genkernel or a kernel seed to help me start out with
> a booting system, I perhaps might have never started using Gentoo; I've
> afterwards managed to change my config over time to look nowhere near
> the original, but at least it makes me happy to have experienced the
> handholding to bring me where I am today. These "little things" matter.
> 


Indeed. It really comes down to a judgement call whether to compose a
news item or not.

I myself in my sysadmin day job get this right about 50% of the time if
I'm lucky. I've learned (via hard knocks) that if a number of people
raise concerns, then it very well might not be bikeshedding, it might be
valid. Often as the BOFH I'm too close to the technical problem to
notice the human elements - that needs a view from 10 feet back.

News items are probably one of Gentoo's best ideas ever.


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com

[OT] Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[Tom Wijsman]

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On Wed, 04 Jun 2014 00:49:48 +0200
Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:

> Indeed. It really comes down to a judgement call whether to compose a
> news item or not.

True, it is not always easy; although some of us want or try to figure
this out in advance, even predictions won't help to determine how well
the users will experience these kind of effects. The more these events
happen, the more I think they're aftermath is inevitable, the more it
would be nice to redesign to prevent the events from happening.

Especially when you get to know the Portage output better, it is hard to
judge how well the Portage output still is for existing users; I have
no motivation to improve the Portage output for myself, given I can
find my way in it in a reasonable amount of time (given the parameters
--tree and --unordered-display which are not default).

But that's where it stops; though I recognize that it is not as helpful
for new users, as well as want to improve it for them, it is hard to
know where to start and what kind of output to go for. We're locked
down to a particular view; thinking of other views, it'll be hard to see
one where there is a benefit that outweighs the costs implementing it.

So, then you can come to the conclusion that we have good enough output
considering the conditions in which the output can be changed; and as a
result of it not changing, we rely more and more on its knowledge.

> I myself in my sysadmin day job get this right about 50% of the time
> if I'm lucky. I've learned (via hard knocks) that if a number of
> people raise concerns, then it very well might not be bikeshedding,
> it might be valid.

What I'm trying to say was that it is still in some way valid when you
bike shed; it isn't so much anymore about the central point being
discussed about being valid, but the idea behind why you're discussing
that central point.

Among other things, this highlights things in the organization and/or
respect of the matter at hand; it won't result a change wrt to the
central point, but it'll result in a change of organization and/or
respect.

Just because you can't quickly find out a date to go out with someone
doesn't mean you can't do it more organized and respectful next time.

> Often as the BOFH I'm too close to the technical problem to notice
> the human elements - that needs a view from 10 feet back.

When faced with a technical problem; there are 3 or more ways to take a
stance, some of which conflicting stances make the human part matter:

 1. Aggressive: You want your work to happen and lead to results.

 2. Defensive: You want to prevent your work from changing, you want to
 prevent the results of your work from changing.

 3. Neutral: You don't know much about the work, it's not clear what
 you want; given that, you'll play devil's advocate to learn more of it.

Now, with any of these; it is easy to get into the human elements,
which have to do with a problem in the organization (expectations,
planning, reports, ...) or respect (finding out what works for both).

Sometimes the view is too far back, because you're as explained above
grown used to the situation; when that happens, you get stuck and
either need to make a comprise not in your favor or need to move on.

A lot of compromises, some recently, get made; which I'm happy about.

A lot of us are here for improving Gentoo, we can't just always
agree on the particular way in which to do that; but it'll be the net
result of all those (dis)agreements, compromises and walks that count.

> News items are probably one of Gentoo's best ideas ever.

True that.

-- 
With kind regards,

Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
Gentoo Developer

E-mail address  : TomWij@gentoo.org
GPG Public Key  : 6D34E57D
GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2  ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D

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Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[Samuli Suominen]

On 04/06/14 01:49, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On 04/06/2014 00:32, Tom Wijsman wrote:
>> On Tue, 03 Jun 2014 22:24:11 +0200
>> Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> The point is, human communication is vastly more powerful
>> +1
>>
>> It might not be clear in the moment, because it looks like a ton of
>> bikeshedding and other ways some individuals would label this; but it
>> will be useful some time from now, when it leads to useful results.
>>
>> Having some people talk about things on a chat, forum, blog, ... might
>> have a short lived effect now with an occasional spike in the future;
>> but, a news item reaches a much wider public for a much longer item.
>>
>> Let's say someone upgrades his system in some weeks / months from now,
>> that person will be thankful that a news item was written about this;
>> instead of having this be part of the already though job of updating.
>>
>> Of course, there is a thing like "too much handholding" but I think
>> that's not the case here as the upower case pops up in a lot of places;
>> one does not have to forget that there is also "too little handholding".
>>
>> If it weren't for genkernel or a kernel seed to help me start out with
>> a booting system, I perhaps might have never started using Gentoo; I've
>> afterwards managed to change my config over time to look nowhere near
>> the original, but at least it makes me happy to have experienced the
>> handholding to bring me where I am today. These "little things" matter.
>>
>
> Indeed. It really comes down to a judgement call whether to compose a
> news item or not.
>
> I myself in my sysadmin day job get this right about 50% of the time if
> I'm lucky. I've learned (via hard knocks) that if a number of people
> raise concerns, then it very well might not be bikeshedding, it might be
> valid. Often as the BOFH I'm too close to the technical problem to
> notice the human elements - that needs a view from 10 feet back.
>
> News items are probably one of Gentoo's best ideas ever.
>
>

I agree, and I'm using news items actively (everyone remembers my udev
related news items you have gotten on every major change, even on
quite small things like configuration filename changes)

All I'm saying is that instructions for simple emerge commands is going
overboard

As in, don't you think I've considered, as a active GLEP 42 user, if there
was a need for one this time? I weighted my options for 3 months before
acting, and people actually agreed with me it wasn't necessary at this
time. I'm really suprised about this, how small group of loud people
on ML can have this kind of effect. It's like, pick a $package_name,
raise enough noise on ML about it, get a news item saying 'emerge <this>'

I'm just expecting more from our users. I don't think the news items
were ever designed for simplistic things like this.

- Samuli

Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[Samuli Suominen]

On 04/06/14 07:11, Samuli Suominen wrote:
> I'm just expecting more from our users. I don't think the news items
> were ever designed for simplistic things like this.
>
>

As in, GLEP 42 Critical News Item != Learning tool for understanding
Portage output

Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[Tom Wijsman]

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On Wed, 04 Jun 2014 07:29:17 +0300
Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On 04/06/14 07:11, Samuli Suominen wrote:
> > I'm just expecting more from our users. I don't think the news items
> > were ever designed for simplistic things like this.
> 
> As in, GLEP 42 Critical News Item != Learning tool for understanding
> Portage output

Simplistic things don't make a lot of users ask for support, file bugs,
etc...; so, it is less simple to users than what you might infer.

UPower is a dependency of a lot of desktop enviroments; besides that,
I still believe that the majority of users don't run systemd. This
makes a blocker like this so wide scale that it at least becomes
important, as it is used much more compared to the CDDA reader example.

Now what makes the difference between important and critical is the
potential to become disastrous; this is where it becomes harder to
judge how critical it is, but at the very least it affects a large
share of users now as well as in future upgrades. They appreciate news.

-- 
With kind regards,

Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
Gentoo Developer

E-mail address  : TomWij@gentoo.org
GPG Public Key  : 6D34E57D
GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2  ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D

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Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 4:24 PM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Yes, it *is* a simple matter of running one easy command. Portage does
> that for you with trivial ease. But portage doesn't tell you *which* is
> the one easy command.
>
> A news item does that.

That is the real challenge here.  It isn't obvious to most users that
upower is causing the problem, and it is even less obvious to users
without using Google that there is an alternative.

Anybody who doesn't read the lists or GMN wouldn't probably wouldn't
realize that the simple fix exists.

Maybe if portage were smart enough to present the user with two
options - replace udev with systemd or replace upower with
upower-pm-utils then users would realize the latter change is the
better one.

I don't want to put out a news item for everything, but when the
output of portage is subtle and the package is so widely used it is
probably better to have one.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[Jeroen Roovers]

On Wed, 04 Jun 2014 07:29:17 +0300
Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@gentoo.org> wrote:

> 
> On 04/06/14 07:11, Samuli Suominen wrote:
> > I'm just expecting more from our users. I don't think the news items
> > were ever designed for simplistic things like this.
> 
> As in, GLEP 42 Critical News Item != Learning tool for understanding
> Portage output

The point of writing it up for others to learn from is the
deduplication of the effort. Instead of having everyone stare blankly
at arcane messages, they'll recognise it and know what to do. Much like
with stabilisation bugs where (again) untargeted dependencies where
every arch developer individually sits staring blankly (and increasingly
furiously, if that's even possible) at the errors that repoman
unexpectedly spits out.

The point is giving that information saves everyone after you the time
to figure out how to resolve the issue. Thanks!


     jer

[gentoo-dev] Re: RFC: news item for upower

[Duncan]

Rich Freeman posted on Wed, 04 Jun 2014 07:41:23 -0400 as excerpted:

> On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 4:24 PM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Yes, it *is* a simple matter of running one easy command. Portage does
>> that for you with trivial ease. But portage doesn't tell you *which* is
>> the one easy command.
>>
>> A news item does that.
> 
> That is the real challenge here.  It isn't obvious to most users that
> upower is causing the problem, and it is even less obvious to users
> without using Google that there is an alternative.
> 
> Anybody who doesn't read the lists or GMN wouldn't probably wouldn't
> realize that the simple fix exists.

This.

It's only simple for me because I saw it right here ahead of time, and 
it's only simple for ssuominen because he knows about the other choice 
since he created the package.  Otherwise, it's an exercise in reading the 
ebuilds, and a good gentooer should be /able/ to do that, but shouldn't 
/have/ to do that in the normal case.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: RFC: news item for upower

[Samuli Suominen]

On 04/06/14 19:21, Duncan wrote:
> Rich Freeman posted on Wed, 04 Jun 2014 07:41:23 -0400 as excerpted:
>
>> On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 4:24 PM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> Yes, it *is* a simple matter of running one easy command. Portage does
>>> that for you with trivial ease. But portage doesn't tell you *which* is
>>> the one easy command.
>>>
>>> A news item does that.
>> That is the real challenge here.  It isn't obvious to most users that
>> upower is causing the problem, and it is even less obvious to users
>> without using Google that there is an alternative.
>>
>> Anybody who doesn't read the lists or GMN wouldn't probably wouldn't
>> realize that the simple fix exists.
> This.
>
> It's only simple for me because I saw it right here ahead of time, and 
> it's only simple for ssuominen because he knows about the other choice 
> since he created the package. 

Wrong.   I'm always using the -t (--tree) flag with Portage and I would
have seen upower being the culprit immediately,
and second command would have been `eix upower` to see available
versions, at which point I would have seen
upower-pm-utils, and figured it out.
Just like with any other B blocker that comes up with normal upgrade
process. I've never since 2006 needed to ask
anyone anything regarding blockers, and it has always been trivial to
find out these things. Long before anything
called "news items" even existed.

- Samuli

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: RFC: news item for upower

[Ben Kohler]

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On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 11:24 AM, Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@gentoo.org>
wrote:
>
>
> Wrong.   I'm always using the -t (--tree) flag with Portage and I would
> have seen upower being the culprit immediately,
> and second command would have been `eix upower` to see available
> versions, at which point I would have seen
> upower-pm-utils, and figured it out.
>
> - Samuli
>
> I'm glad this fire has mostly been put out, but I think you are making
quite a leap here that normal users can "see upower-pm-utils, and figure it
out".  You may be too close to this problem to understand just how
confusing it is to everyone else.

No offense intended.

-Ben

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: RFC: news item for upower

[Dale]

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Ben Kohler wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 11:24 AM, Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@gentoo.org
> <mailto:ssuominen@gentoo.org>> wrote:
>
>
>     Wrong.   I'm always using the -t (--tree) flag with Portage and I
>     would
>     have seen upower being the culprit immediately,
>     and second command would have been `eix upower` to see available
>     versions, at which point I would have seen
>     upower-pm-utils, and figured it out.
>
>     - Samuli
>
> I'm glad this fire has mostly been put out, but I think you are making
> quite a leap here that normal users can "see upower-pm-utils, and
> figure it out".  You may be too close to this problem to understand
> just how confusing it is to everyone else. 
>
> No offense intended.
>
> -Ben

As a user, I have ran into blockers quite a few times.  I either end up
asking on -user or using the trial and error approach.  A lot of the
time, the trial and error approach fails and I still end up posting on
-user or find where someone else beat me to it.  It's rare with the
output that portage gives that I can figure out why something is
blocking.  Generally this is just a issue of a different version of the
same package being needed. 

Given that in this case it is a entirely different package that is
needed to resolve it, I certainly would have been posting on -user. 
Unless portage spelled it out that I needed to use a different package
all together, it would have never occurred to me. 

I might add, I been using Gentoo since 2003.  I'm not a dev for sure and
don't do scripting stuff so diggin in the ebuilds doesn't generally help
me much either. 

Just a users point of view. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 


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Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for upower

[Alan McKinnon]

On 04/06/2014 06:11, Samuli Suominen wrote:
> As in, don't you think I've considered, as a active GLEP 42 user, if there
> was a need for one this time? I weighted my options for 3 months before
> acting, and people actually agreed with me it wasn't necessary at this
> time. I'm really suprised about this, how small group of loud people
> on ML can have this kind of effect. It's like, pick a $package_name,
> raise enough noise on ML about it, get a news item saying 'emerge <this>'


I have no problem that you made a judgement call and didn't think a news
item was necessary. But these things are always a gamble to some degree
and sometimes the effect isn't what you expected with the facts to hand.

Given the number of threads on -user, it really looks like the dice
didn't roll in your favour this time; it looks to you like a simple
decision re blockers but to the users there they see something very
different, and a news item gives them the info they need.




-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com