News items

Gentoo News Items were created to provide a communication medium to push critical messages to users via the rsync tree. The original proposal for news items is outlined in GLEP 42: Critical News Reporting.

News Items can be read using the eselect command. More information on use of this tool to read or delete news items can be found on the news.eselect man page.

Adding a news item

Choose a filename in the proper format: YYYY-MM-DD-shortname.lang.txt, i.e. the date, followed by a very short name of at most 20 characters and consisting only of a-z, 0-9, + (plus), - (hyphen) and _ (underscore). This is followed by lang which is an IETF language tag. Always use en for English, unless you are translating a news item. Finally, the filename ends with the extension txt.
Write the news item, which is similar to a RFC-compliant email. Details concerning what is allowed can be found in the appropriate GLEP section. As a note: Exceptions depending on installed packages or activated profiles are possible.
Send the news item to the gentoo-dev mailing list and the Gentoo PR team (pr@gentoo.org) 72 hours in advance of commit.
Wait for corrections or feedback that your news item is not of great importance and should be revoked (can be possible).
Create a directory structure for your item in the gentoo-news repository (git+ssh://git@git.gentoo.org/data/gentoo-news.git): YYYY-MM-DD-shortname/.
Add the news file to that directory.
Commit and push your changes to the gentoo-news repository.