Comments on: Gentoo News

By: x

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 12:24:07 +0000

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.

By: dieterv

dieterv — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 12:16:29 +0000

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.

By: postmodern

postmodern — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 03:55:42 +0000

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?

By: Daniel

Daniel — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 01:29:38 +0000

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.

By: ciaranm

ciaranm — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 00:40:13 +0000

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.

By: Tarmo

Tarmo — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 00:05:05 +0000

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.