Some packages give you useful information at the end of an install, typically telling you to remember to do something special to the Apache config or running some script to set things up etc. However, if you install something that has lots of dependencies, this can take hours and produce several thousand lines of output. So chances are slim to none that Joe User will actually read the useful parts, since it's displayed at the end of each individual install and not at the end of the whole install chain. Yes, you can force users to capture stdout/stderr and go through the NN thousand lines of output afterwards, or you can fix it so that these "nuggets" of information are remembered and displayed at the end of a run. Even better would be to also capture this info somewhere semi-structured and have some sort of extra command/option to call up this information whenever you want. (Note, I haven't actually made sure that you don't do this already so feel free to disregard :-)
*** Bug 4943 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
When i first thought about this, i thought about config file system. It would say that you have this and this many unread infos in queue. The "info-files" would be stored as ebuild-##.##.##.info files in a dedicated directory. And when read with a program like etc-update, you would have an option to delete the file. This has at least one problem that i can come up right now: If ebuild informs about errors with einfo (if einfo output is hidden, wouldn't want to read about error messages through that service.). Like Quake2 -ebuild does (informs if there are no output support). This could be solved with different command for outputting errors. Error messages would ofcourse be in different colors and all.
Wouldn't it be useful to let portage show all the einfos at the end of an emerge 'session', like is done with rsync? Einfos are supposed to give important information, so the user will probably want to see it anyway. So basically it will be more automatic. I guess portage could log all the einfos to a file for each session and print the file at the end?
*** Bug 11137 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 11359 ***
