[gentoo-dev] Re: RFC: Gentoo News file about GNOME 3.2's unmasking

[Alexandre Rostovtsev <tetromino@gentoo.org>]

On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 7:56 AM, Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 5:56 PM, Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 2:13 AM, Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>> Since GNOME 3 is already in the
>>> tree, and the news file content is straightforward, I'd like to commit
>>> this in 24hrs if there are no problems.
>>
>> If we're gong to go to all the trouble to create upgrade guides and
>> news/etc, wouldn't it make sense to send out the news item a few days
>> BEFORE making the change?
>>
>
> That was indeed the intention, but there was a miscommunication.

On my part, it was a failure of imagination. I had always seen large
changes dumped in ~arch with no warning or documentation (even the
png15 upgrade didn't get a news item until libpng-1.5.x went stable),
and so unquestioningly came to assume that it's the way things are
done because that's the way things were always done. Then some hours
after gnome-3 was unmasked, I saw Nirbheek talking on IRC about making
a news item, and winced: of course! why didn't I think of that? As an
~arch user, I had not particularly enjoyed massive changes being
dumped on my head without warning, so now that I was a developer and
it was in my power to write news items, why didn't I think of writing
one before unmasking?

-Alexandre