Re: [gentoo-dev] openrc portage news item

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 3:08 AM, William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Someone suggested that we make emerge not work until the news item is
> read. There is nothing I can do in openrc to make something like that
> happen. It would be something that would require a portage modification.

Honestly - I see that as a future enhancement for portage/PMS/etc, and
not something that should hold up openrc.  There are a number of
situations where such a feature would be useful, and trying to
shoehorn in a hack for openrc doesn't make sense.

Perhaps a future/in-progress EAPI could define a mechanism where an
ebuild can indicate that a particular update or set of circumstances
is a system-critical change, and that the package manager should
consequently alert the user and ensure that they have confirmed the
action.  Then we have a nicely defined interface that we can use for
things like major baselayout changes, gcc/glibc ABI changes, and so
on.

Otherwise the best we can do is widely publicize the change (news,
lists, website, etc).  In this case the news is out a full week before
the update, which I think is good timing (long enough that missing it
is less likely, not so long that forgetting it is likely).

Rich