I started the grep-dctrl rewrite last spring. I soon had most of the
code implemented, and I asked for testers on -devel. There were no
debs at that time, and so it probably was not much of a surprise that
nobody volunteered. I got discouraged and abandoned the project for
several months.
In August, just before my vacation at work ended, I decided to polish the
code, and I did. I prepared debs and was ready to submit them to unstable.
(At that time I was under the impression that experimental was the wrong
place for any grep-dctrl stuff.) I felt it was necessary to warn users
about the code, since it was sure to contain nasty surprises.
I considered sending a mail to some lists: -devel-announce would have reached
my audience, but the message would have been inappropriate there; I feared
it would not be noticed in -devel. I considered a message at installation time,either with debconf or without. However, debconf messages are seen by
system administrators and not users, so that was not an attractive option.
I finally decided on that annoying banner:
==========================================================================
NOTE
grep-dctrl has been rewritten from scratch. Although this does add new
features, regressions are certainly possible. Please watch for them and
report them to the BTS.
==========================================================================
(The above annoying banner will not be shown to you again, unless you
request it with the -B switch. It will also be removed entirely soon.)
I took great care to make the banner as unobtrusive as possible, still taking
in account that it had to be prominent to have any effect. I added logic that
would suppress the banner after a user had seen it once (using a dotfile in
home directories, ~/.grep-dctrl-banner-shown; if you find one in your home
directory, you can now safely remove it). I did not print it to stdout
(it would clobber the output) nor to stderr (it might be redirected, which
would have been counterproductive); rather, I used /dev/tty. After all,
many people use grep-dctrl in scripts without realizing it; especially they
would need to know that there was a weak link there.
Nevertheless, I expected to get flamed for this. To my considerable surprise,
I got no reactions - aside from several good and substantial bug reports.
The banner stayed in longer than I intended, mainly because I was exhausted
by my teaching duties during the autumn. I finally removed it last week,
in
1.103.
And then, several days after the banner had been removed, I get
a bug report
(which, strangely, is still open even though I sent a closing message almost 24
hours ago). That's when I decided to post this entry.
