Gentoo News
There’s a name for that. It’s called spam. If you try to force me to read news of any variety, I will be extremely pissed, and will come up with (and publish to anyone who wants it) a way around this. The notice that I have files to upgrade in /etc is fine, it’s vital to the running of my system. Some “news” (and the apache config file changes are a perfect example) is not. Of all the gentoo systems I’m personally aquainted with, only 1 (that’s right 1 out of almost a hundered) runs apache, and cares in any way about the apache config files. You, by any definition of you, have no right to force me to read any kind of news.
I have no objection to you putting news into the portage tree, as long as it’s agressively pruned to keep the space down, but you should not and will not force me to read it.
UPDATE: For the record, I’m not respoding to GLEP 42, I’m responding to the specific post referenced, and the sentiment that it espouses, that the need of developers to get news to the users overrides the right of the users to be left alone. I think any push format for news that is not *trivially* disabled will be universally dispised and hacked around.
Isn’t the news supposed to only show up if you actually upgrade or have the package that the news is about? …So you’d only see apache news if you use apache.
Heh, GLEP 42 addresses both of those concerns. You’ll only get Apache news on boxes using Apache, and disabling news is one documented line in a config file.
For the record, I was not responding to GLEP 42 (which I have not read), I was responding to the post I referenced, and the sentiments there.
It almost seems as if we need some sort of subscription mechanism to allow users to instruct this news service what information they would like to view, if any. If the news is going to come in the ebuilds or appended to them in some NEWS file, maybe a PORTAGE_NEWS option should be introduced or yet-another USE-flag?
I’m not following all the details around the proposal, so don’t shoot me if this has already been discussed.
Aren’t new features to portage supposed to have a FEATURES flag in make.conf? Pretty simple actually, if news is defined in FEATURES portage shows the news. Otherwise it keeps quiet. Then once a new profile is created (2006.1 for example) it can be enabled by default, and people not wanting news define -news in make.conf.
I think this whole thing is like adding feature to fill a hole that shouldn’t be there in the first place.
Clean design is not made up by filling holes.. certainly not by spamming news around. What does it serves a purpose for if 50% (of the devs even!) disable it? It means it’s wrong and shouldn’t be used. Even if it was 25% it would still show it, for the blind one, as far as statistics sucks.
More energy should be put, maybe, into that portageng or whatever it is now, to handle the einfo and all that stuff the way it should. Even if that takes a few monthes instead of a 15min news hack.