[pacman-dev] [PATCH] Allow package to display a brief message before sync install

[James Rayner]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 11:20 AM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> 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