On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 11:20 AM, Dan McGee <[email protected]> wrote: > > I don't really know what to think here. I had looked at that messages > one for a long time and thought it was a decent idea, but never went > far enough to take it and run with it. > > @Loui- sure, but this is for extraordinary messages- a lot more > exclusive than ChangeLog-worthy stuff, and you have to explicitly > request to see that anyway. > > @Jeff- it isn't exactly straightforward to view an install script > beforehand, and the post_install business is a rather hacky reason for > needing an install script. > > -Dan >
Dan's got the idea... pacman should not break someone's system without at least telling them first. So yes - this is intended for more extraordinary messages. The current ways of informing the user (homepage/forum news and post-install) are broken and non-simple: - both polling based - both have too much noise In the last year there's been one or maybe two news items where I've actually had to take action. 1/365 chance of breaking something -- I'll take those odds and deal with it afterwards. Even if I only Syu weekly, that's 1/52. Would you bet on odds 98% in your favour? So is it really surprising that people _don't_ read the news? My patch might not be the ideal way of implementing some sort of pre-install alert and definitely has a few pitfalls, however it's works and an example of a very simple implementation that could be extended. James
