We have received a few bug reports to mirror-admin@gentoo.org when a user has a problem with their portage tree. They invariably reference an error message similar to the following: ------------- >>> Updating Portage cache: 90%!!! Cannot resolve a virtual package name to an ebuild. !!! This is a bug, please report it. (virtual/x11-6.8) ------------- And, since it's not clear where they're supposed to report it (and since our mirror-admin@gentoo.org email address is in the rsync MOTD) they send it our way. Please change this error message to be more descriptive. At a minimum, please change it to say: "This is a bug, please report it via http://bugs.gentoo.org" Thanks.
I'm afraid there's no workaround for ID-10-Ts. Putting bold 20 point letters explanation stating <snip> Gentoo Linux: The Gentoo Linux Distribution - Ebuilds and System related issues. If you're unsure where your bugs go, then file them here. </snip> still cannot prevent people from filing bugs under the goats product every day.
This isn't even an id10t issue....this is us not giving the users enough information. "report this bug!" isn't enough. Even if a user can reasonably assume that we must have some sort of issue tracking system somewhere, they don't know if it's bugs.gentoo.org, bugzilla.gentoo.org, support.gentoo.org or what have you. We need to at least give them a wee bit more info in the error message.
The message from comment #1 is no longer in portage but grepping of the 2.1_pre1 sources turned up 2 more that don't mention bugs.gentoo.org: ./pym/portage.py:4832:print "!!! Please report this on IRC and bugs if you are not causing it." ./bin/ebuild.sh:486:echo "!!! Please attach the config.log to your bug report:"
<bugs admin> i think the issue is definitely to be more descriptive in the portage error output. i'm going to get idiots misfiling bugs regardless of anything short of adding a <blink> </bugs admin>
The "This is a bug, please report it." message was killed in 2.0.51.20. "Please attach the config.log to your bug report" should be acceptable as it is shown when an ebuild fails. "Please report this on IRC and bugs if you are not causing it."? I've only seen that happen once. It was from Antarus and he caused it. So that one can be killed too as a traceback would have been more informative.
Removed the final "visit IRC" message. Nothing else can really be done.
If the new, complete error message is: "Please attach the config.log to your bug report" Could we at least change it to say: "Please attach the config.log to your bug report and submit it to http://bugs.gentoo.org" Not everyone will inherently know that bug reports are supposed to go to a web site, nor will they inherently know that the web site is likely to be bugs.gentoo.org.
echo "!!! Please attach the following file when filing a report to bugs.gentoo.org:" echo "!!! ${PWD}/config.log" How's that?
wfm -- as long as "bugs.gentoo.org" is in there somewhere, I'm a happy camper. thanks.
Released in 2.1_pre2.
