[Nix-dev] Breaking changes log

[Mateusz Kowalczyk]

On 12/17/2014 01:55 PM, Wout Mertens wrote:
> Nice though it seems a bit complex. Not sure if it's over-engineered or
> just what's needed.
> 
> Also interesting:
> *"There have been complaints regarding the comprehensibility of some
> upgrade notices and news items in the past. This is understandable — not
> every Gentoo developer speaks English as a first language. However, for the
> sake of clarity, professionalism and avoiding making us look like prats, it
> is important that any language problems be corrected before inflicting a
> news item upon end users.*
> 
> *Thus, at least 72 hours before a proposed news item is committed, it must
> be posted to the gentoo-dev mailing list and Cc:ed to pr at gentoo.org
> <pr at gentoo.org> (exceptions may be made in exceptional circumstances). Any
> complaints — for example regarding wording, clarity or accuracy — must be
> addressed before the news item goes live."*
> 
> <shudder>
> 
> Wout.
> 

This is just administrative mongering, no need to adopt it fully. I
agree that either some kind of news system should be in place: currently
I think the only thing we have going is putting ‘trace’ somewhere and
hoping the user catches it.

In any case, I think calling it ‘news’ is misled: in Gentoo news are
used for longer term things, say distro moving off from Ruby 1.x for
it's default or whatever. But maybe that's what OP wants.

Personally I want to be able to emit a message from a package such as
‘XYZ flags have changed, you need to do such and such thing’ or ‘extra
user interaction is needed to get this package to work, put this thing
in such and such directory under $HOME’. Gentoo's portage does this,
such things print during the package build (not always applicable) and
at the end of the builds. I can see multiple problems here in that
unlike with Gentoo, we often fetch multiple different versions of same
software as various dependencies, the user is rarely directly using it
all. I don't know how to deal with this properly. Maybe it's just a bad
idea for nix.

> On Wed Dec 17 2014 at 2:45:31 PM Oliver Charles <ollie at ocharles.org.uk>
> wrote:
> 
>> One thing I really like is Gentoo's "news" feature - which seems to be
>> discussed in detail at http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GLEP:42. Maybe
>> something like that is what you're envisioning?
>>
>> -- ocharles
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 1:27 PM, Wout Mertens <wout.mertens at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Would it be nice if we kept a file with breaking changes?
>>>
>>> That way, nixos-rebuild should be able to list the breaking changes
>>> between the current version of the channel and the last time the system was
>>> built.
>>>
>>> We'd also have the full list of breakage for release notes.
>>>
>>> Thoughts? What would such a log look like?
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Wout.
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nix-dev mailing list
>>> nix-dev at lists.science.uu.nl
>>> http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
>>>
>>>
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Mateusz K.