Bug 517310 – emerge: --ask could ask to read pending news items

• Product: Portage Development
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Fabian Groffen 2014-07-17 09:26:45 UTC]

Currently, emerge behaves as follows:


(principia:~) # emerge -Dua world

 * IMPORTANT: 1 news items need reading for repository 'gentoo'.
 * Use eselect news to read news items.


These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies /

...

Would you like to merge these packages? [Yes/No] 


At this point, a wise user enters "no" and does eselect news read.  However since --ask is in action, perhaps emerge could ask after the "IMPORTANT" message whether the user wants to read those pending news items (maybe even during dependency calculations) such that it is not necessary to abort and start emerge again.

I guess a simple "eselect news read" call would do, after which emerge would simply resume what it was doing.

[Comment 1 Alexander Berntsen (RETIRED) 2014-07-17 11:27:24 UTC]

There's this notion that emerge should not be interactive apart from the merge question. autounmasking is an exception. Personally I don't see a problem with your suggestion. It makes sense. You would not want to waste time calculating dependencies twice.

If I see no objections within a week or two, I'll go ahead and implement this.

Thanks for the idea.

[Comment 2 Michał Górny 2014-07-24 20:01:18 UTC]

Well, I'm not really sure about changing interactivity here. You can always do ^z or use another terminal to read the news. But it's just a matter of habit.

[Comment 3 Alexander Berntsen (RETIRED) 2014-08-12 08:17:14 UTC]

Created attachment 382716 [details, diff]
Fixes the bug

[Comment 4 Zac Medico 2014-09-27 18:59:14 UTC]

This is in git:

https://github.com/gentoo/portage/commit/b2e192049456a172a1a24e0f9b2bc65b50c284f5

[Comment 5 Brian Dolbec (RETIRED) 2014-09-27 19:40:01 UTC]

This is released in portage-2.2.14_rc1

[Comment 6 Lars Wendler (Polynomial-C) (RETIRED) 2014-09-28 07:38:36 UTC]

Reopening. 

I'd like to request having this feature optional. Either through FEATURES or --option. Otherwise it totally disturbs my workflow with portage which I have for years.

Thanks.

[Comment 7 Alexander Berntsen (RETIRED) 2014-09-30 07:19:04 UTC]

It's its own option in git now.

[Comment 8 Zac Medico 2014-10-20 19:38:21 UTC]

(In reply to Alexander Berntsen from comment #7)
> It's its own option in git now.

Looking at the changes:

https://github.com/gentoo/portage/commit/7d605312d48ae5f7755f640ef78c97b424399bd0

That may be the only UserQuery that is not conditional on --ask (it's conditional on --read-news instead). Maybe it should be conditional on both?

[Comment 9 Zac Medico 2014-10-20 20:09:13 UTC]

Created attachment 387084 [details, diff]
emerge --read-news: prompt only if --ask

This patch makes --read-news have no effect unless --ask is enabled.

[Comment 10 Alexander Berntsen (RETIRED) 2014-10-21 07:12:30 UTC]

I don't care particularly much. Patch looks good to me. Go ahead and push it.

[Comment 11 Zac Medico 2014-10-21 23:17:47 UTC]

(In reply to Alexander Berntsen from comment #10)
> I don't care particularly much. Patch looks good to me. Go ahead and push it.

Thanks, it's in git now:

https://github.com/gentoo/portage/commit/3a22c197d00b81efeb78fe75359b49316844c2e2

[Comment 12 Zac Medico 2014-10-21 23:23:43 UTC]

With typo fixed:

https://github.com/gentoo/portage/commit/8a9f865ae433d8b7609bd1754e0328d88d2a2bda

[Comment 13 Brian Dolbec (RETIRED) 2014-12-04 06:08:38 UTC]

This is in the portage-2.2.15 release.