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

On Mon, 23 Mar 2026 at 16:52, Dale <[email protected]> wrote:
> the news item should make it clear that nothing needs to be done at all.  A user with no knowledge of this, like me for example, could read the news item and think this is something that needs to be switched to. [...]

That's a completely fair point. If you read the news item properly it
should be clear that there's only one "just to be extra safe" todo.
But if you read it with a "what are the todo this time ?" question in
mind, I can see how you could think that the update command, or even
the repair commands or the uutils opt-in some are recommended in all
cases. I could have phrased it better.

> As a user, I'm not sure why I should be seeing this news item.

The reason is that there is a possibility the system remains in a
slightly broken state for a long time, so the new items gives a
command to shorten that time. There's more than that, but that's the
core reason, the optional-but-recommended todo for the user.

If the code improvement works, the "slightly broken state" will become
negligible and we can hopefully drop the news item altogether.

> There's a new alternative package coming out.  OK. Is there going to be a news item every time something gets added to the tree now?

Clearly not.

> As a user, if someone is interested in using the new package, have a wiki page that shows how to switch or even possibly, run the two packages side by side.

Maybe someone will create a uutils wiki page or a forum post. That
doesn't feel too important to me, I just want the feature to exists,
interested users will find it.

> I like the addition of the news item system but not sure if this is the right application of it.  A news item where most everyone will do nothing just doesn't seem like the right way to me.

Maybe this news item was overzealous or overcautious. I'm just a user,
this is the first time I'm contributing something that complex to
Gentoo, I wanted to do things by the book.