On Sat, 2010-12-25 at 12:16 +0100, David Demelier wrote: > Hi, > > A lot of people always forget to read UPDATING (that's normal we'll are > humans). > > Each entry in UPDATING is like "AFFECTS: users of net-mgmt/flowd" so if > an update of net-mgmt/flowd is available and a *recent* entry in > UPDATING talks about then print the message. > > This can prevent a lot of breakage and useless noise on lists. What do > you think ? > > Merry Christmas and happy holidays ! > > David.
Or there is another possibility - find someone vocal enough to finally *enforce* all new entries to UPDATING to be machine readable. You already slightly touched the issue - but what exactly one considers "recent"? I've seen people that don't upgrade anything non-security related for months and some even years, when not directly required as dependency. And those are actually the cases when everything breaks horribly in the end - I guess for obvious reasons. It wouldn't be that hard to reqire all entries in updating to be in a specific and meaningful format, i.e. DATE=20101225 PORT=x11/gnome2 VERSION=2.32.1 SEVERITY=1 # 0 = informational, 1 = critical/showstopper COMMENT=Manually deinstall x11/somethingnolongercool and force recompile devel/libstupid before upgrading to this version of Gnome === Then just let upgrade tools deal with the data as they want, i.e. some really cool ones might show all entries between %my_version% and % current_version% and based on severity, either optionally let users skip over the warning - * /This application no longer ships with skype-voice-whatever plugin, please recheck your configuration/ doesn't really count as show stopping - versus - * Don't allow upgrade process to continue unless user explicitly confirms "Yes, I've totally read that and just finished all the steps required" for cases where there is guaranteed that upgrade *WILL* break without following those steps first. Something like this would finally make UPDATING an integral part of any upgrade process, not just "some half-forgotten text file that one *should* keep an eye on - but usually only after all hell broke loose". m. -- Michal Varga, Stonehenge (Gmail account) _______________________________________________ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"