Simon Stelling wrote:
Hi,
Duncan wrote:
and see what's up, or one can visit the website and check it out there,
but for such a critical part of a Gentoo machine's infrastructure, one
would certainly wish for something a bit easier than either of these.
Erm, is that a joke? You want an easier way than browsing to a web page
and read? Why should portage go different ways than every other software
project?
Expanding on the idea a bit further, what about creating a generic "emerge
changelog" function, that fetches the tarball if necessary, then extracts
only the changelog, and opens it for viewing (presumably using the $PAGER
environmental variable to determine what to display it with)? Naturally,
given Gentoo can't control the upstream changelog format, enforcing
parseability rules as it does for its own, the entire changelog would of
necessity be displayed, leaving the user to figure out the relevant
cutoffs instead of doing it automatically as emerge -pl does with the
portage tree changelogs, but it'd still be a rather easier way to view
upstream changelogs before installation (or for that matter, after) than
we have now.
Portage is a package manager. package managers have to manage package
versions and their dependencies. They do NOT have to be fancy changelog
readers. As you already stated, it's not the developers responsibility
to get you upgrade information. While I can see a great benefit in
putting important information into the changelog, I really can't see why
portage should provide functions to read a changelog, when nearly all
packages provide the same information on their homepages.
Because the functionality already exists and is in stable portage?
Because some developers maintain system critical packages that can cause
large amounts of breakage and get complaints from users when things
break? Gentoo is a distribution and there is some responsibility to
provide users upgrade paths when packages switch versions. Gentoo isn't
just portage, IMHO.
Additionally,
if you really have to read the changelog before emerging the new
version, the information is really important, and I'm sure it will show
up in portage's changelog.
Please don't make portage a news reader.
Regards,
--
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