Re: Octave MESSAGE

[Jason Bacon <outpaddling%yahoo.com@localhost>]

On 2019-03-29 12:13, Greg Troxel wrote:
> Jason Bacon <outpaddling%yahoo.com@localhost> writes:
> I generally am opposed to the notion of MESSAGE.  With package managers
> and dependencies, I don't think people see them, and almost all of it
> should be in regular documentation in /usr/pkg/share/doc/PKGNAME or
> similar.
You're probably right that they're mostly ignored, but I myself have 
learned to pay attention to them and I'm sure others have as well. As 
long as they exist, I would argue that we should use them to educate 
users, especially about key pitfalls.  A agree that regular docs should 
be well maintained and promoted as well, although I'm not sure users pay 
any more attention to them than they do to MESSAGE.

I think people do tend to see MESSAGEs from leaf packages like octave.  
Dependency package MESSAGEs are more likely to be missed since they 
scroll off the screen before the install is done.
> I don't see this as about octave, or any particular package like that,
> but more broadly about the notion of setting up a server that is
> intended to display on remote systems.   But I see where you are coming
> from that only a few X programs behave this way.
>
> If the font dependency could be added in such a way that it isn't vast,
> some normal font is picked, and it is satisfied by native X11 when
> native is selected, then that seems like a good approach.
True it is about setting up headless servers with X11 programs in 
general.  The question is how to help the end user as much as possible, 
where it's easy for us.  My end users are insanely busy scientists who 
really appreciate being able to install a program and have it just work, 
or being told exactly what to do if there is another step involved.  In 
some cases I install software for them and in other cases they might do 
it themselves (e.g. collaborators in other places with limited IT support).

In the latter case, if they run

pkgin install octave

or

pkgin install emacs

then I would want it to either work out-of-the-box or leave a warning on 
their terminal that they may need to install some fonts. Otherwise, 
they're going to have a hard time figuring out what the problem is, 
since they tend to have very limited IT skills.

Adding some text to MESSAGE in packages they're likely to install is one 
easy way for us to make their lives easier, even if only a fraction of 
them pay attention to it.  Good PR for pkgsrc...

Cheers,

    JB