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somebox
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 03, 2005 9:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've read this thread, and I see some basic problems with the way people update systems. By going through a normal gentoo install, most users understand how to emerge -pv and check for warnings. But there are so many options and ways to update a system, and the compiles take a while, so people miss the messages.

1. Urgent messages due to upgrades should be seen BEFORE the upgrade is done. This might not be possible -- some checks occur after package build is done -- but there must be a way to do this?

2. By default (at least on my system), /var/log/emerge.log does not contain the scary warnings. Where do they go?

Often, it takes hours to upgrade my slower system. When I come back to check, there's a lot of output to look for. Asking people to read the newsletter, forums, and changelogs BEFORE they update is not going to work, people just get used to a maintenance routine -- emerge -uDav world, hit "Y", and walk away. Come back later, check for problems.

There should be a way -- within emerge -- to see potential conflicts, WARNINGS, system layout changes before they proceed. Or they need an easy way to downgrade a package. This may exist, but after using Gentoo regularly for the last three years, I have not found it yet (besides doing a lot of reasearch on the forums before upgrading).

I'm sure this has been debated many times in the Gentoo community, my apologies for not (yet) knowing the whole history. I try to read the GWN, but sometimes the big stories do not grab your eye over the team changes, community building, etc.

Perhaps there's an RSS feed someone keeps with urgent portage issues and news?
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 03, 2005 10:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

amne wrote:
Btw: I'll stab everyone who complains he didn't know about the upcoming python upgrade with a rusty sponn.

Haha, I'm responsible for that upgrade so people can just keep complaining to me :D
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2005 4:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Damn, I got hit by this one too...

However I do subscribe to GWN, also to the lists et al... however, coming back from a holiday and running an update _before_ reading your mail isn't the wisest thing I suppose (although sense dictates otherwise!).

I do agree that there needs to be a greater degree of control or at least some form of user interaction required in this kind of situation.

I really don't think expecting people to check external communication vectors is very productive.

I still love Gentoo, however it's going more and more to the desktops I run... keeping on top of the updates and glsa-check'ing all the time is a little too much work for production servers i.m.h.o.

Anyone recommend a good sever distro? lol <ducks!> :cry: 8) :lol:
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2005 4:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

sever distro.. quite freudian!
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2005 5:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, it doesn't really belong here, but for servers, if I'm not using Gentoo, I'm using Slackware.
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 06, 2005 4:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi,

I just had a power failure here, and found that Apache2 didn't work after the reboot. It's fixed now (and you can all guess why it stopped working), but...

loki99 wrote:
But if you have a better idea how to handle something like that, I bet the devs (and me too!) would love to hear about it.


Sure - how about a facility to block the package from being emerged and issue a warning instead?

For example, I'd type "emerge world" and go to sleep. When I wake up and take a look at the summary at the end (where it says I need to make changes in "/etc") there's an additional line that says something like "Package 'Apache2' not updated due to changes - see the web site '<some web page>" for more information".

Then I'd know what needs to be done to unblock it, emerge/update it and re-configure it in advance. I wouldn't need to find out that my web site is down after the next power failure and confused users venting on forums would be avoided completely. Of course it'd also be good if things like "you need to restart the <something> deamon" in the summary too...

For bonus points, you could allow portage to send an (optional) email summary too. That way I could add "emerge sync" and "emerge world" to "cron.weekly" and fix up everything when I read the emailed summary.


Cheers,

Brendan
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 06, 2005 5:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

btrotter wrote:
For example, I'd type "emerge world" and go to sleep.


Granted you do not appear to be complaining with out some sort of solution but......

Why in goods name are people emerging world and going to SLEEP!

Seem 90% of the people who had a major issue with this are people of this type.

Updates _should_ be monitored and _researched_ before blindly tossed on a server.

I would lose my job if I performed this way. As would I expect to.
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 06, 2005 5:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

^^^ Yes.

It's an even better idea to run "emerge -auvD --changelog world", study the output, and then decide whether to accept the updates, then go to sleep.

Oh, and once you wake up, don't forget to run etc-update or dispatch-conf.
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 06, 2005 5:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If we kept a vanilla package like every other daemon we run, we wouldn't be having so many problems. Unfortunately though, and the devs have to understand, apache has been butchered repeatedly. It came in as httpd, moved to apache. We had /home/www which later became /var/www/localhost, conf files have been changed, split and now moved.

People don't like change, however small the change is... apache has had it's share of changes.
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 06, 2005 5:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

fuji wrote:
People don't like change, however small the change is... apache has had it's share of changes.

Just a bit.
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 6:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi,

dashnu wrote:
btrotter wrote:
For example, I'd type "emerge world" and go to sleep.


Why in goods name are people emerging world and going to SLEEP!

Seem 90% of the people who had a major issue with this are people of this type.

Updates _should_ be monitored and _researched_ before blindly tossed on a server.

I would lose my job if I performed this way. As would I expect to.


I think you're looking at this from the wrong perspective. From my point of view the most relevant questions is "Why in goods name shouldn't people be able to emerge world and go to sleep?".

If you expect users to research the changes and monitor everything, then you're expecting people to waste many hours each week just to keep their system up-to-date. Compare this to Microsoft's "update" utility.

I should point out, I'm a Gentoo user. I am not a Gentoo developer, a Linux developer or a system administrator. All I want to do is have a web server running (perhaps with X, KDE, Mozilla, etc). I don't care about the internals at all and I don't care who changed what and why. I have better things to do with my time and only care that it works.

I've been running Gentoo as a web server for the last year, and have been using it for more things as time goes by. To be honest, I'm using it like a desktop/development machine too because most of the things I did on other (windows and redhat) computers can be done just as well on Gentoo and I couldn't be stuffed turning the other computers on.

I don't bother reading the thousands of lines of gibberish that "emerge world" can generate, I don't bother reading mailing lists, I don't bother reading articles on the Gentoo web site (unless I'm installing/configuring something new). From my point of view I shouldn't need to - any requirements along these lines represents a design failure.

Despite this, apart from minor configuration hassles it has been entirely stable from the start - the "uptime" command tells me how long since the last power failure and always has, and anyone in the world has been able to access my web pages for all of this time (excluding during power failures and while the OS boots following one).

You are right in that Gentoo hasn't quite reached the level where portage can be done as a cron job and mostly ignored, but IMHO this is what Gentoo should be trying to achieve rather than expecting all normal users to know as much as the developers.


Cheers,

Brendan
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 8:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

btrotter wrote:


I think you're looking at this from the wrong perspective. From my point of view the most relevant questions is "Why in goods name shouldn't people be able to emerge world and go to sleep?".

If you expect users to research the changes and monitor everything, then you're expecting people to waste many hours each week just to keep their system up-to-date. Compare this to Microsoft's "update" utility.


Linux is Not Windows :!:

BTW, how many times have you been wondering wtf something stopped working after using that awesome windowsupdate? You can't do this with Windows either, it's definitely stupid w/ production servers and you are doing a sloppy job as administrator if you behave like that.

btrotter wrote:

I don't bother reading the thousands of lines of gibberish that "emerge world" can generate, I don't bother reading mailing lists, I don't bother reading articles on the Gentoo web site (unless I'm installing/configuring something new). From my point of view I shouldn't need to - any requirements along these lines represents a design failure.


Huh? Then either don't admin servers or at least don't complain if anything breaks - you've not done your job properly.

btrotter wrote:

You are right in that Gentoo hasn't quite reached the level where portage can be done as a cron job and mostly ignored, but IMHO this is what Gentoo should be trying to achieve rather than expecting all normal users to know as much as the developers.


No, that's really not our goal at all. Developers should provide high-quality distribution/ebuilds with sane default configuration, but system configuration/maintenance/upgrading has always been users' responsibility. Software does change - and sometimes it changes pretty fast. If you are upgrading blindly without knowledge, then one day it will just break. Good luck picking up the pieces then.
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 10:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

btrotter wrote:
I think you're looking at this from the wrong perspective. From my point of view the most relevant questions is "Why in goods name shouldn't people be able to emerge world and go to sleep?".

Because catering for every potential configuration change would require a superhuman amount of effort by the developers, and is totally impractical.

You're wanting a distro like Debian Stable or Redhat Enterprise instead - distros that have a very different focus to Gentoo, and cannot possibly be so up-to-date. You'll still be caught out occasionally by their updates, though.

Quote:
If you expect users to research the changes and monitor everything, then you're expecting people to waste many hours each week just to keep their system up-to-date. Compare this to Microsoft's "update" utility.

Bad comparison. Compare it instead to the combination of Microsoft's Windows update, Microsoft's Office update, Symantec's updater, a few other updaters for 3rd-party software on a Windows PC, and the annoyance that most programs will have to be updated manually, when you become aware (somehow) of a new version. The Windows XP Service Pack 2, for example, broke apps, including making PCs unbootable.

Quote:
I should point out, I'm a Gentoo user. I am not a Gentoo developer, a Linux developer or a system administrator. All I want to do is have a web server running (perhaps with X, KDE, Mozilla, etc). I don't care about the internals at all and I don't care who changed what and why. I have better things to do with my time and only care that it works.

No PC or OS is at the maturity level where it is self-maintaining. Maybe in a hundred years or so.
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 11:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi,

j-m wrote:
Linux is Not Windows :!:


I'm not suggesting that Linux is Windows, or that it should be like Windows. In fact I've always been of the opinion that any OS needs to differentiate itself from other OSs in order to provide a reason why people would use it instead of something else (or in simple terms, the closer Linux is to Windows the less reason people have to use it instead of Windows).

I am suggesting that, over time, software should improve and perhaps that any software that needs constant baby-sitting should eventually be improved into something where baby-sitting is automated as much as possible. It is also my opinion that a "Perfect OS" (which never will exist) would make systems administration entirely unnecessary, and the goal of any OS is to strive for perfection (and therefore strive to make professional system administrators unemployed :wink:).

An example of this would be making some improvements that allows the OS to automatically check for upgraded packages, to automatically download packages, to automatically check package dependencies and automatically compile packages for the target platform. Could you imagine doing all this by hand?

j-m wrote:
BTW, how many times have you been wondering wtf something stopped working after using that awesome windowsupdate? You can't do this with Windows either, it's definitely stupid w/ production servers and you are doing a sloppy job as administrator if you behave like that.


Only once that I can recall, and only because I was trying to get Windows 98 to handle dual monitors using completely different video cards (something Windows 98 never supported properly - it was an experiment that resulted in an ugly mess). To be honest, I don't use windows update often as my windows machines are entirely disposable.

j-m wrote:
btrotter wrote:

I don't bother reading the thousands of lines of gibberish that "emerge world" can generate, I don't bother reading mailing lists, I don't bother reading articles on the Gentoo web site (unless I'm installing/configuring something new). From my point of view I shouldn't need to - any requirements along these lines represents a design failure.


Huh? Then either don't admin servers or at least don't complain if anything breaks - you've not done your job properly.


It appears you've neglected to consider what I may have meant by "any requirements along these lines represents a design failure.". I'd also request that you understand the difference between complaining and suggesting improvements...

j-m wrote:
btrotter wrote:

You are right in that Gentoo hasn't quite reached the level where portage can be done as a cron job and mostly ignored, but IMHO this is what Gentoo should be trying to achieve rather than expecting all normal users to know as much as the developers.


No, that's really not our goal at all. Developers should provide high-quality distribution/ebuilds with sane default configuration, but system configuration/maintenance/upgrading has always been users' responsibility. Software does change - and sometimes it changes pretty fast. If you are upgrading blindly without knowledge, then one day it will just break. Good luck picking up the pieces then.


I realize this may not be one of Gentoo's current goals, but I'd wonder why it isn't and how long it'll take before they figure out that it should be.

Let me ask you this: Would you consider it "excellent" if it was possible to spend one day installing and configuring Gentoo as a minimal web server and then forget about it completely, only to find ten years later that it's still running, still up-to-date and had no downtime at all?


Cheers,

Brendan
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 11:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

btrotter wrote:
I realize this may not be one of Gentoo's current goals, but I'd wonder why it isn't and how long it'll take before they figure out that it should be.

Because it's practically impossible, both now and for the foreseeable future, will you please realize that? We don't have AI for a start, which would be a requirement for such a level of completely automated reconfiguring.
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 11:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

btrotter wrote:

It appears you've neglected to consider what I may have meant by "any requirements along these lines represents a design failure.". I'd also request that you understand the difference between complaining and suggesting improvements...


No, ability to "administer" a server without any knowledge and without following the development/security issues etc. is not a part of the design effort here. Honestly, this just leads to open proxies, chains of spambots, tons of spam in mailboxes, worms flooding the internet. And it does not matter if that's Windows or Linux, each server administered in a sloppy way which is connected more or less permanently to internet can potentically become a huge annoyance.

Everyone who thinks that he's a system administrator when he's able to install IIS w/ a few mouseclicks (and forget about it then, leaving the gapping security holes/missing hotfixes etc.) is plain wrong.

btrotter wrote:

I realize this may not be one of Gentoo's current goals, but I'd wonder why it isn't and how long it'll take before they figure out that it should be.


See above.


btrotter wrote:

Let me ask you this: Would you consider it "excellent" if it was possible to spend one day installing and configuring Gentoo as a minimal web server and then forget about it completely, only to find ten years later that it's still running, still up-to-date and had no downtime at all?


And now - back to reality... :P
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 12:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi,

j-m wrote:
No, ability to "administer" a server without any knowledge and without following the development/security issues etc. is not a part of the design effort here. Honestly, this just leads to open proxies, chains of spambots, tons of spam in mailboxes, worms flooding the internet. And it does not matter if that's Windows or Linux, each server administered in a sloppy way which is connected more or less permanently to internet can potentically become a huge annoyance.


Please understand that I'm talking about maintaining the status-quo, not the initial installation/configuration.

Consider something extremely simple like a spell-checker. When it's initially installed the user would need to decide which dictionary/language to use, which users can modify the dictionary or whatever. After this any updates would either use the exact same configuration (if possible), automatically adapt the old configuration into a new configuration (for minor configuration file changes) or inform the user that the configuration files need some manual attention (for larger configuration file changes).

Now extend this to everything. During installation, everything would still need to be configured to be secure, and occasionally some of the configuration would need to be manually updated. You wouldn't end up with security problems, but you would end up with a system that only requires a system administator's attention when it's necessary (instead of all the time, regardless of whether it's needed or not).

The only real question is how the system administrator finds out that a configuration file needs to be manually updated. Should portage expect the system administrator to find out somehow beforehand without reminding them or making sure they are aware of the changes, or should portage let them know directly?

It seems a simple choice to me...


Cheers,

Brendan
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 12:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

btrotter wrote:

The only real question is how the system administrator finds out that a configuration file needs to be manually updated. Should portage expect the system administrator to find out somehow beforehand without reminding them or making sure they are aware of the changes, or should portage let them know directly?

It seems a simple choice to me...


Wrt to apache, there is einfo in the ebuild and there is changelog (and this is valid for pretty much any ebuild in portage). Since you decided to ignore both of them (and also ignore all the documentation/announcements/mailing list provided by Gentoo), then you are on your own, sorry. You are in exactly the same position as a Windows user who turns on automatic updates and does not care any more until something breaks.
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 12:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi,

j-m wrote:
btrotter wrote:

The only real question is how the system administrator finds out that a configuration file needs to be manually updated. Should portage expect the system administrator to find out somehow beforehand without reminding them or making sure they are aware of the changes, or should portage let them know directly?

It seems a simple choice to me...


Wrt to apache, there is einfo in the ebuild and there is changelog (and this is valid for pretty much any ebuild in portage). Since you decided to ignore both of them (and also ignore all the documentation/announcements/mailing list provided by Gentoo), then you are on your own, sorry. You are in exactly the same position as a Windows user who turns on automatic updates and does not care any more until something breaks.


That's a matter of opinion. In my opinion portage failed to make sure I'd read the changelog and/or failed to make sure I'd read the documentation/announcements/mailing list. I did not conciously decide to ignore these announcements but rather was not aware I needed to read them, and therefore was unable to decide.

Out of curiousity, how hard would it be to make portage tell the user that the configuration files for an ebuild need manual attention and block the emerge until the user tells portage that they have read the accompanying documentation? Can anyone think of anything wrong with this idea?


Cheers,

Brendan
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 2:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

btrotter wrote:

That's a matter of opinion. In my opinion portage failed to make sure I'd read the changelog and/or failed to make sure I'd read the documentation/announcements/mailing list. I did not conciously decide to ignore these announcements but rather was not aware I needed to read them, and therefore was unable to decide.


Did not you? That's what you've written a couple of posts back:

btrotter wrote:

I don't care about the internals at all and I don't care who changed what and why. I have better things to do with my time and only care that it works.

...

I don't bother reading the thousands of lines of gibberish that "emerge world" can generate, I don't bother reading mailing lists, I don't bother reading articles on the Gentoo web site


So - In my opinion you failed to do your job; portage is a package management system, not a mentoring tool. Do you thing that the changelogs/ewarns/einfos/documentation/etc. are provided b/c developers have a great fun when writing them?

btrotter wrote:

Out of curiousity, how hard would it be to make portage tell the user that the configuration files for an ebuild need manual attention and block the emerge until the user tells portage that they have read the accompanying documentation? Can anyone think of anything wrong with this idea?


I've already commented on this numerous times back in this thread. Any sort of blocking/bailing out just because a location of a couple of config files has changed in a stupid hack and no solution; user ignorance/lack of interest/laziness is not a legitimate reason to cause problem to other users and break the emerge chain.
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 5:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi,

j-m wrote:
btrotter wrote:

That's a matter of opinion. In my opinion portage failed to make sure I'd read the changelog and/or failed to make sure I'd read the documentation/announcements/mailing list. I did not conciously decide to ignore these announcements but rather was not aware I needed to read them, and therefore was unable to decide.


Did not you? That's what you've written a couple of posts back:


There's a difference between knowing about an announcement and choosing to ignore it, and not knowing about an announcement. I've never read any of these things and never known it was necessary (and had no prior problems to indicate otherwise).

j-m wrote:
btrotter wrote:

Out of curiousity, how hard would it be to make portage tell the user that the configuration files for an ebuild need manual attention and block the emerge until the user tells portage that they have read the accompanying documentation? Can anyone think of anything wrong with this idea?


I've already commented on this numerous times back in this thread. Any sort of blocking/bailing out just because a location of a couple of config files has changed in a stupid hack and no solution; user ignorance/lack of interest/laziness is not a legitimate reason to cause problem to other users and break the emerge chain.


Ok, I've gone through all previous posts and compiled a list of these "reasons" why you think it's not a good idea:

Quote:
Because catering for every potential configuration change would require a superhuman amount of effort by the developers, and is totally impractical.


This reason is totally broken. A simple "warn users of config changes if updating" flag (with an addition URL for more info) or a similar simple system, should be easy to add to portage. Setting this flag would be much easier and much more effective than sending out emails on the mailing list (which I assume also requires a superhuman amount of effort???).

Quote:
So - bailing out just because configuration files require a manual tweaking after upgrade is definitely NOT an acceptable solution. Just imagine that you run 'emerge something' on a slow machine and walk away (or leave it running overnight) to come back a couple of hours later and see some stupid unneeded message and the remaining 30 ebuilds not emerged - argh!


This seems like a good reason, but it's not. Emerge should not stop after the first error but should emerge everything it can. If emerge always stops after the first problem it encounters, then this is a seperate issue that is not directly related configuration file changes. IMHO the "correct" behaviour would be to skip packages where the "warn users of config changes if updating" flag hasn't been acknowledge but still emerge the remaining packages, just like the "correct" behaviour for failing to emerge a blocked package would be to continue emerging any remaining packages. Even pre-fetching packages that can't be installed immediately would be a good idea.

In any case, "good sys-admins" would have read the announcements and unblocked the package before doing "emerge world" or used "--really-update" or whatever, so the additional system wouldn't effect these "good sys-admins". It could even be made optional, so people like me can enable it and others can leave it disabled and use portage without any change.


As far as I can see, these are the only reasons.

After reading through every post in this topic, I found many people suggesting something like this and no good reasons against it, I've found many people caught out by this problem (including people who did read the announcement), and I've found developers continually blaming users for not reading announcements.

Surely by now the developers would be looking for any way possible to force these "bad sys-admins" to look at the announcements, if only to save themselves the hassle of responding to "bad sys-admins" over and over and over again.

This issue reminds me of "George's Corner". It's an intersection between a minor road and a main highway about 10 Km north of where I live. Every six months or so there'd be a fatal car accident, despite many prior announcements on TV and in newspapers and despite the fact that it was common knowledge that it's an accident-prone area. Eventually our council decided make physical changes to the intersection - better signage, an extra "left turn" lane and a reduced speed limit for that stretch of the highway. It didn't entirely fix the problem, but the results where remarkable - much better than any form of announcements ever could be.


Cheers,

Brendan
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 9:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

btrotter wrote:
This reason is totally broken. A simple "warn users of config changes if updating" flag (with an addition URL for more info) or a similar simple system, should be easy to add to portage. Setting this flag would be much easier and much more effective than sending out emails on the mailing list (which I assume also requires a superhuman amount of effort???).

We're not going to break the emerge chain on purpose for no better reason than users not caring enough about their updates and being caught with their pants down so to speak. Portage is not supposed to do any needless handholding if it gets in the way of users paying proper attention.

Gentoo gives admins a lot of power to customize and optimize their systems as they see fit but it also requires a bit more work and/or attention from the admin at times. Personally, I'd hate to see this change as I love the way Gentoo differs from most other distributions.

If anybody can come up with a good solution to the problem that doesn't require needlessly breaking the emerge chain I'd love to hear about it. enotice and portage spitting out warnings/infos after all the merges finishes would be a small step on the way but that's the best I can think of currently.
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j79zlr
Apprentice
Apprentice


Joined: 05 Dec 2004
Posts: 235
Location: Chicago, IL

PostPosted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 10:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

FreeBSD already has your solution, and I pointed it out in this thread. The idea of portage was stolen from them, so why not also steal this helpful little thing. There is a file called /usr/ports/UPDATING where specific instructions regarding updated ports go. If there are necessary steps outside of the normal portupgrade procedure they are outlined there. Very simple. I run cvsup, I check /usr/ports/UPDATING, no new entries, or no entries that affect me, I continue. I've done this for many years without a single problem, all because there is a localized and simple way to check before proceding with the upgrade, that doesn't involve searching through newsgroups or mailing lists to find an answer. I don't see why /usr/portage/UPDATING couldn't be developed.
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PaulBredbury
Watchman
Watchman


Joined: 14 Jul 2005
Posts: 7310

PostPosted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 5:01 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

btrotter wrote:
This reason is totally broken. A simple "warn users of config changes if updating" flag (with an addition URL for more info) or a similar simple system, should be easy to add to portage. Setting this flag would be much easier and much more effective than sending out emails on the mailing list (which I assume also requires a superhuman amount of effort???).

Are you volunteering for this documentation/administration task? I count 20,597 ebuild files (i.e. *.ebuild - versions of packages) in my /usr/portage, for 10,179 packages. Assuming you're totally dedicated and efficient at this task, take 20 minutes per ebuild file, work an 8-hour day for 5 days a week, and take no other holidays or breaks, it will take you 3.3 years of continuous effort to document all the ebuilds in this simplistic manner. I'm sure we'll all be grateful, and won't moan at the end that we still have to read some of it, and do some work ourselves, to configure and maintain our systems.

There is always the annoyance that people will occasionally point out that your work is not all that important, due to the frequency of changes to configuration files of varying importance between package versions, and the fact that "emerge -s <packagename>" shows the homepage of the package for more info.

Of course, by that time there may be 100,000 packages in Gentoo, at the rate that open-source software seems to be growing. So, you'd have an unpaid, tedious job for life.
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Kloeri
Retired Dev
Retired Dev


Joined: 02 Sep 2002
Posts: 144

PostPosted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 1:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

j79zlr wrote:
FreeBSD already has your solution, and I pointed it out in this thread. The idea of portage was stolen from them, so why not also steal this helpful little thing. There is a file called /usr/ports/UPDATING where specific instructions regarding updated ports go. If there are necessary steps outside of the normal portupgrade procedure they are outlined there. Very simple. I run cvsup, I check /usr/ports/UPDATING, no new entries, or no entries that affect me, I continue. I've done this for many years without a single problem, all because there is a localized and simple way to check before proceding with the upgrade, that doesn't involve searching through newsgroups or mailing lists to find an answer. I don't see why /usr/portage/UPDATING couldn't be developed.

I kinda like this idea but I don't really expect all the people who didn't read any of the announcements to read a UPDATING file either. After all, the announcements were quite widespread and the ebuild even told people to be careful with this update and pointed them to proper documentation.

Would be nice if somebody proved me wrong though :wink:
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