Michał Górny wrote:
> Did you ever do any serious package work, or are just discussing theory?
Michał, you're talking with a user. Please behave.
Make a concerted effort to put yourself in his situation. Talking
down to him ("did you ever do any serious work") is not helpful
for your image, for the user, or for the Gentoo project.
> Repoman is not a social tool. It's a technical dep checker
It's a developer tool. I've never run repoman myself and what little
I know about it suggests that I will never need to run repoman until
I have commit access to the portage tree. Even then it seems like a
nasty kludge that compensates for VCS limitations.
Because it's a developer tool you need to be doubleplus clear and
pedagogical whenever a user experience bubbles up to the tool (which
is unknown to us users).
I too spent some hours on fixing an out-of-the-blue python-exec mess
when I wanted to do some updates. For me that was a regression and I
hope that whoever cost me (and undoubtedly others) those hours at
least learned something from it that they didn't know before, if only
that this one user considered it a (for me) pointless regression.
> Do you see now what you are proposing?
You may remember that I do consider stable pointless. It is just an
euphemism for "old".
It makes the distribution into a time buffer, and a time sink, while
at least this upstream would much rather have direct connections to
users.
Taking another few steps back, I think it might be really cool if
Gentoo had so powerful tooling that as a user you wouldn't even
notice them. But that's some dream for the future perhaps. :)
> > The output can easily be improved:
>
> If it can easily be improved, then why didn't *you* improve it yet?
You sound like an asshole here and I don't think you intend to. :\
You clearly want to encourage a user to contribute, but despite your
good intentions the words you choose have exactly the opposite effect
and if I were Zac I wouldn't be so happy.
You can communicate the same intended message using other words and
get the effect you want. It just requires thinking about who the
recipient is.
> We must be having different users.
I think Martin is a user, not a developer.
> we actually have stable users who essentially want *stable* system.
Yes, this is very true.
Maybe it is too ambitious to have the same portage tree for both use cases?
Not that it cannot be done, of course it can, but maybe the effort
required is just unneccessarily high. Maybe it would be easier to
make portage deal only with either kind of tree rather than both
trees in one, and to make some tooling to keep stabilization as easy
or maybe make it even easier than it is. Just an idea.
> And by using 'package.use' you 'undo' USE defaults in packages and
> global flag defaults, and... why do we have USE flags at all? We're
> just all undoing stuff anyway.
You're confusing things.
I dislike defaults when I have an opinion. I often have an opinion
and portage lets me express it well! <3
But while writing this mail I actually found a default that isn't
even documented which I disagree with, and it annoyed me because I
need to create an exception for it. (dev-qt/qtscript-4.8.5 USE=jit
which isn't mentioned in use.local.desc. File a bug? No, not now.)
That + in IUSE before the USE flag is surely intended to be helpful
but because I don't want jit (as wrong as I may be) it's annoying.
I can opt-out, but just as with marketing I would much rather opt-in,
as I have done with many hundred other USE flags, and many marketeers.
> Then the user gets to rebuild python-exec which is a tiny C executable.
> Reverse dependencies are not rebuilt.
I don't recall the details of my python-exec problem anymore, I
suspect it might have had to do with slots being introduced into
the package for the first time. I also had fun with libpng.
Rich Freeman wrote:
> Users who take advantage of new features in these kinds of states
> are going to run into problems. That's just the cost of being on
> the cutting edge.
Why should a feature be allowed to cause problems? To me that just
means that the feature isn't finished yet, so why publish it?
Yes, I'm somewhat bug-intolerant.
//Peter
