[gentoo-dev] RFC: cleaning away old news items

[gentoo-dev] RFC: cleaning away old news items

[Petteri Räty]

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Hi everyone,
when doing a fresh installation I noticed that during I get to see many
old news items. There used to be a problem with Portage so no news items
could  be removed. I think that has now been fixed for years so we
should be able to do this without problems. How about we start by
cleaning away everything from for example before 2011? Alternatively to
total removal if we want keep them for historical purposes, we could add
conditions that make them impossible to show to anyone.

Regards,
Petteri


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Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: cleaning away old news items

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 9:35 AM, Petteri Räty <betelgeuse@gentoo.org> wrote:
> when doing a fresh installation I noticed that during I get to see many
> old news items. There used to be a problem with Portage so no news items
> could  be removed. I think that has now been fixed for years so we
> should be able to do this without problems. How about we start by
> cleaning away everything from for example before 2011? Alternatively to
> total removal if we want keep them for historical purposes, we could add
> conditions that make them impossible to show to anyone.

++

If anything does have lasting value by all means move it to the
handbook/docs.  Likewise we could have a webpage of archived news for
anybody doing an upgrade of a 3-year-old system or something.  News is
going to be the least of their problems though.

A year seems like a reasonable timeframe for retiring old news - that
is a year from hitting stable, not ~arch (if applicable to stable).

Rich

[gentoo-dev] Re: RFC: cleaning away old news items

[Michael Palimaka]

On 25/11/2013 01:35, Petteri Räty wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> when doing a fresh installation I noticed that during I get to see many
> old news items. There used to be a problem with Portage so no news items
> could  be removed. I think that has now been fixed for years so we
> should be able to do this without problems. How about we start by
> cleaning away everything from for example before 2011? Alternatively to
> total removal if we want keep them for historical purposes, we could add
> conditions that make them impossible to show to anyone.
>
> Regards,
> Petteri
>

Removal of no longer relevant or very old news items is specifically 
permitted by GLEP 42[1]. I did some targeted removals in the past, and 
it didn't cause any issues as you said. A wider-ranging cleanup is 
definitely a good idea.
Archiving them is no problem, since they will always still be in git 
history.

[1]: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0042.html#news-item-removal