Additional Coordination Needed Internally to Gentoo Project

drumz · Apprentice Joined: 10 Nov 2002 Posts: 213

First: The intention of this is NOT to start a flamewar, or to complain about Gentoo in general. The intention is to make an improvement from the end users side to something that needs to be thought about now before it becomes a real situation. This post is about *constructive* feedback to the developers.

I've been a heavy Gentoo user now for more years than I can remember (prior to that I was on RedHat). Throughout this time my experience has been great, and as a developer I apperciate the work of the Gentoo team. There have been a few minor bumps along the road for one reason or another, but considering the pace that Gentoo moves it's a truly remarkable accomplishment. Today, however, there are probably many people who use Gentoo in production or sem-production environements at home and at work or are trying to convince their management that it can be done.

And this is where an issue is starting to surface that some thought/mechanisms need to be put into place.

Issue: From an outsiders perspective (non-Gentoo developer) there is a need for better communication between the developers cutting code/releasing updates and the documentation staff and more importantly the end users when changes to an important component are made that can affect the stability/usability of the users' systems.

Examples:

1. A new baselayout was released not long ago. There was no notification that the upgrading of this would change networking. In fact, for many wireless users who previously had to do home grown mods to get wireless running on boot this killed their network connections with no warning. At the time I didn't know that the new baselayout was the root cause of my broken wireless setup, but I had participated in a thread many months ago that I had a vague memory about where a developer had posted that the wireless setup was going to change so at least I had a clue - others weren't so lucky.

2. In the last few days a change was made to the way genkernel behaves. Not only did it change the naming of the files, but the parameters needed to properly build everything changed without warning. A search of the forums revealed others with the same issues I had, unable to boot a new kernel. Reading one thread pointed to a bug report that had the solution. The bug was posted July 10 and as of this morning (July 16th) the Gentoo Handbook has not been updated with appropraite changes to the main docs.

For both of these, the user had to go to the forums (an EXCELLENT resource) to find solutions/workarounds. Instead, if notification had been given either on the main web page or in the weekly newsletter both problems would have been greatly reduced. Now I'm NOT suggesting that notifications be given for EVERY package (like apache, MySQL, Postgres, etc). Users of 'outside' packages should be aware of any changes to those packages by monitoring the appropriate sites for those packages.

In the case of example number 1 above, I contacted someone that I believed to be a developer and started an offline conversation with him via email. I made the above suggestion and his response was:

nixnut · Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2005 2:19 pm Post subject:

Good points. I think I agree with pretty much everything you pointed out. One issue is how to reach users, even if the release of new versions of "critical" packages are coördinated with the documentation team and a release notice is created. Maybe portage should get an optional facility for spitting out such announcements that users can enable if they wish to see such notifications. Then when a package like baselayout is emerged and it requires users to do stuff (like editing config files) to keep their system in a functional state, they could be warned of that before the actual emerge of that package.
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drumz · Apprentice Joined: 10 Nov 2002 Posts: 213

That would be a great thing to have - someplace where the messages from portage can be spit out to. This would help catch the people that didn't see the prior notifications about changes.

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Alighieri · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 27 Jan 2005 Posts: 88

I couldn't agree more. I suggest a read-only email list or forum or blog site where devs can post notification of significant changes whenever a package gets marked stable (~arch -> arch). The key point is that this channel of communication should not be mixed with any other topics or day-to-day chat.

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Alighieri · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 27 Jan 2005 Posts: 88

Alighieri · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 27 Jan 2005 Posts: 88

Ma3oxuct · Guru Joined: 18 Apr 2003 Posts: 523

Why not just post such messages in the "News & Announcements" forum here?

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

drumz · Apprentice Joined: 10 Nov 2002 Posts: 213

1. Adding another layer, an intermediary who does NOT know about every single package and the interactions between all packages would still leave a hole. Having another layer working as an aggregator would also add a delay to the whole thing so that a package may be released to the world before the aggregator culls through all the possible places developers may have posted something. Not to mention the aggregator may not fully understand the techincal implications of something the developer did or did not state.

2. A very simple solution would be a web based form the developers would have access to that would allow them to fill out just a few fields. The package name and version and a brief description of what may break for some users. It could also include links to updated documentation, etc., if it's available. A minute or two is all it would take and it could either display on the main web page as a new news entry or have a link along the side/top that the users could check regularly (maybe even RSS). Doing this only invovles one of the web developers for a bit to build the page and put it into place. After that the use and upkeep is hardly anything at all since it won't be used all the time. The impact on the developers would be minimal too. Beyond that the issue is how the deveopers can effectively communicate to the doc people what changes need to be made.

Q-collective · Advocate Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 2071

Alighieri · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 27 Jan 2005 Posts: 88

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Chaosite · Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2005 5:23 pm Post subject:

People, cool down.

You want implementation ideas? OK, fine, try this for size. Everytime a package maintainer notices that the package has changed significantly in config files, or whatever (Depends on the package), a special entry would be placed on the changelog, which would begin with, lets say, "!!!". The changelog would contain a oneline summary of the change, and a link to someplace (devspace, forum post, migration guide...) with further explanations.

Now, this is obviously only for major changes to existing functionality that have a high chance of breaking. These packages would then have their own symbol in "emerge -p" output (Again, lets say "!", but it can be anything) to mark that they're going to require special attention and that using "--changelog" for them would probably be in order.

If its a system package thats involved (or any package, depends how you want to do it), it will show up on the main page, similar to the GLSA list on f.g.o.

This took me about 5 minutes of thinking. I'm not really familiar with portage internals, but I don't think it'll be very hard to accomplish, if inefficient - A more efficient way would probably involve a variable in the ebuild.

loki99 · Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2005 6:01 pm Post subject:

qmx · n00b Joined: 31 Mar 2005 Posts: 46

why they don't just put a confirmation?

drumz · Apprentice Joined: 10 Nov 2002 Posts: 213

Pip Wrote:

rhill · Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2005 8:37 pm Post subject:

renrutal · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 3:34 am Post subject:

This situation looks a lot like the ones in GLSA, both want to prevent and inform the user that their system might go down if they don't take a proactive stance and solve their problems before these have the chance to occur. Agreeing with that the others said, GLSA infrastructure could be used in this case to handle this problem. Even considering the problem/breakage have already occured, we would be able able to recover faster since the information about it would be widely available.

With those announcements, it would be easier to make heavy but necessary changes in Gentoo. Most of us will be aware of them and make the transition to these changes painless. A perfect place to tell everyone "We will change stuff in the next week so be prepared!", and put a link to the walkthrough.

More users doing what the developers tell them to do = happier developers.

How to implement it? Have the developer fill a bugzilla-like form, but instead of the problem give the solution. Press Submit button and it will be sent to the proper emails, mailing lists, forums, RSS feeds, pagers, snail mail, and everyone else who want it.

rhill · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 4:55 am Post subject:

this topic is also being discussed on the dev mailing list right now so i threw them a link to this thread. hopefully we can get some constructive discussion going between the two, or at least get an idea of what they would consider implementing.

i don't think anyone disagrees that this would be beneficial to both devs and users (less bug reports for the former, less frustration for the latter). what we have to figure out is how to go about it.
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jasperbg · Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2005 1:26 am Post subject: