Re: news item: Introduction of app-alternatives/coreutils

On Mon, 23 Mar 2026 at 13:58, Eli Schwartz <[email protected]> wrote:
> You've consistently seemed to claim that Gentoo does news items "for new
> app-alternatives", e.g.
> [...]
> For gpg, lzip, ninja -- we didn't have news items. They weren't expected
> to break, nor was it necessary to tell users of them how alternatives
> work, because everyone is now expected to know.

Ok, fair enough, if I've overestimated the need for a news item I'm
happy to do without, to avoid extra work and this heated discussion.
My initial analysis was that the unusual complication inherent in this
particular app-alternative justified the need for a news item, but I
have code changes planed that should bring the risk in line with other
app-alternatives.

> I assure you I'm not shy to say yes, I do believe adding 50% cognitive
> overhead for "as a user what does this mean I need to do" via 4%
> additional lines, is still an impactful reason to debate the validity of
> a notification seen by 100% of users.

You aren't shy about pulling numbers out of your hat.

> The fact that it then confuses users into thinking they might "need" to
> switch is just making it worse. It is not my primary objection.
> Nonetheless, allow me to make my opinion bulletproof clear:

If user confusion was actually the issue, the paragraph could be reworded.

> uutils is technical trash and introduces security vulnerabilities, bugs,
> etc. Nobody should use it, but Gentoo is about choice, including the
> choice to break your system or be insecure.
>
> i am fiercely opposed to utilizing a news item to *en passant* cause it
> to gain undeserved traction, yes.

This is the core issue: you have a passionate bias against uutils and
are willing to blow any nitpick out of proportion to block the whole
thing. I'll keep that in mind for my future interactions.

> Report it as a bug to the bash-completions project,

This is planned (fish and zsh as well). It's just a big messy set of
changes and I didn't want this PR to wait for perfect shell
completions.

> don't write a
> section in a news item for something that is not even changing.

Ok.

> Note bash-completion doesn't allow installing your own completion here.
> It is defined at startup in /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion
> and not via complete -D's processing of _comp_load picking up dropin
> files for commands with no completion after shell init is done.
>
> It works by parsing --help.

Oh I know, I've already spent a lot of time reading the completion
code and past efforts to make it more flexible. It's unglamorous work
but I'll get to it at some stage.