On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 5:56 PM, Rich Freeman <ri...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 2:13 AM, Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbh...@gentoo.org> wrote: >> Since GNOME 3 is already in the >> tree, and the news file content is straightforward, I'd like to commit >> this in 24hrs if there are no problems. > > If we're gong to go to all the trouble to create upgrade guides and > news/etc, wouldn't it make sense to send out the news item a few days > BEFORE making the change? >
That was indeed the intention, but there was a miscommunication. > If a user runs emerge -u world daily they wouldn't even see this news item. > > Obviously the horses have already left the barn, but maybe this is > something we can do differently when it comes time to stabilize the > change? > All is not quite lost. An elog was added to the end of gnome-base/gnome-core-libs which would be merged very early on in the upgrade process. Of course this is not a substitute at all, but does alleviate the issue. A forums post was also made by tetromino. > I'm sure this was inadvertent, but looking beyond just this particular > incident is there anything we can do to improve our use of news items? > Since we're a distro that uses rolling releases users really have no > way to know what to expect after any particular emerge world. It > could be some completely routine bump that isn't going to cause > problems, or it could require extensive rebuilding, config-file > tweaking, and risk of the system not booting. News is really the only > way to give them a heads-up in advance. Granted, something like a > gnome/kde bump is going to pull in so many packages that I think most > users would exercise caution, so that mitigates the issue a bit. > I think that the addition of a Display-If-Visible option would help, along with the addition of news file procedures to the devmanual and the quizzes. Even I didn't know where to commit the news file before some creative googling today gave me the right answer. -- ~Nirbheek Chauhan Gentoo GNOME+Mozilla Team
