On 2018-03-21 00:44, Ryan Schmidt wrote: > To be honest, I wasn't aware of this GSoC proposal until the emails started > showing up on this list recently, so I don't really understand it yet. The > entry on the wiki is vague. Could someone give some examples of the types of > announcements we're envisioning publishing via this system? We already have > the announce mailing list and the news section of the web site for publishing > announcements of general interest to the entire MacPorts community. Is this > new proposal supposed to be yet a third way to publish the same > announcements, or rather different announcements related to specific ports, > for which we currently don't offer a solution other than the "notes" > variable? If the latter, then I don't see wanting to make it visible on the > web site, at least not until we have a redesigned site with individual pages > for each port.
As the idea is inspired by Gentoo Portage, the use cases and requirements in their design document [1] for this feature would also apply to us. This would be meant for situations where we change defaults or remove ports, for example old python/perl/etc. modules. For example it could show such a news entry to everyone who still has a py35-* installed and ask them to install the corresponding py36-* port, when the former are going to be removed shortly afterwards. It could have been used to warn about the switch to perl5.26, which introduced incompatible changes that caused confusion for users. Gentoo used it to release such a warning [2]. In our case we could have used it if perl5.26 or p5.26-* is a requested port, which probably indicates the person is using it for third-party scripts. Another case would be ports where an update changes configuration file formats or location. While this could also be announced in 'port notes', it is unclear how long we want to keep it in there and it will be shown to users on each upgrade. I am afraid that users will ignore the port notes if they show information that is no longer relevant to them. For example the apache2 port is still showing how to migrate from 2.2 to 2.4, but how much longer would we want to keep this around? A news entry could have a conditional to check whether the user has already migrated or not. News entries can be marked as read and would therefore not unnecessarily nag the user with the same information over and over again. We could also use it to remind users to install new Xcode versions, with a conditional based on macOS and Xcode version. Of course we could also distribute our normal announcements over the same channel. Although most users are running 'port selfupdate' and thus would already have the latest MacPorts version when the news arrives with the ports tree. Rainer [1] https://www.gentoo.org/glep/glep-0042.html [2] https://www.gentoo.org/support/news-items/2017-10-10-perl-5_26-update.html
