On Sat, 5 Nov 2005 00:58:14 +0000 Ciaran McCreesh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Feedback from people who have something useful to say would be very > much welcomed, assuming of course that they've read the GLEP. Things that I think are generally ok as is: - news item format - news item distribution (server side) Things that I'd like to be changed/I'm not completely sure about: - filtering of news items: I've already asked a similar question in another mail (in other context) without an answer, but how many news items do people believe will exist at any given time? Depending on the actual implementation it might be required to scan all existing news items which could take some time if there is a large number of them (say, more than a few hundred) It's clear that noone can present accurate numbers, just after some rough estimates here. Also it might be useful for this filtering to be an external tool using portage functions and called by portage (see also below). Although this could be considered an implementation detail as it's mostly transparent for ebuild devs/users. - local storage of news items / "read" attribute: I don't really the like the copy-if-new feature and handling at the fs level, I'd use a file that lists the ids of news items (potentially with a timestamp and/or status field). I don't see any benefits of having redundancy here, and accessing the news in $PORTDIR is simple enough. Granted race conditions might be an issue (where the solution complicates tools), but that's so minor I wouldn't really care about it. Another thing that's unclear: "Whenever relevant unread news items are found, emerge will copy or symlink the news file into /var/lib/gentoo/news/." This "Whenever ... are found" is too vague, should this apply to emerge --sync, any emerge operation, any "import portage" call or what? This isn't just an implementation detail. PS: I'd avoid symlinks here at all costs, too easy to break them. Also as Brian and Jason have said already, the system should be able to handle multiple repositories. So to use the current GLEP as example, at least the path should be changed to /var/lib/gentoo/news/porttree - quality control: "Any complaints regarding wording or clarity must be addressed before the news item goes live." Playing devils advocate here, but complaints regarding correctness are not mandatory to be adressed? As for using -core, please add a small explanation or at least a reference to the appropriate policy docs (and please save the comments about GuideXML uris ;) Things that should definitely be changed: - Integration with existing systems: This definitely should be a requirement for the GLEP to be considered final. It doesn't prevent some thing being implemented sooner than others, but multi-channel distribution (to use a buzzword) is a requirement from where I come from. Marius -- Public Key at http://www.genone.de/info/gpg-key.pub In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be Light.' And there was still nothing, but you could see a bit better. -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
