Hi Jason,

Please please do continue posting to the list.  That's what it's for :)
As for the unresolved issues -- the glibc/gcc one you should probably
open a bug about it at bugs.gentoo.org

The metadata one is best answered by carpaski who is currently (as of
last night) 400 emails behind on this list, due to mail server issues
that he's had.  As for the uninstalling one -- that's also a portage
issue.  I might suggest coming to irc.freenode.net into the
#gentoo-portage irc channel to discuss that kinda thing.  The clobbering
issue is something that needs to be addressed, and will be in a future
iteration of portage, to be sure.

Essentially, I think the idea is to *before* merging into the live
filesystem, check that a file is not duplicate; if it is, back it up
into a tarball and store that.  That way when the new package is
unmerged, leaving the old package only, then the previously stored stuff
can be restored.  Dunno if that makes sense or no.  In many cases like
su, and ping and stuff like that, a decision is usually made after some
developer discussion to just axe it out from one of the packages,
because the other one has a superior implementation.

Hope that helps, and sorry if you felt lost in the flotsam and jetsam of
the list.  It's honestly nothing personal, it's just the high traffic
that -dev generates these days.  And of course, you're always welcome to
chat with developers and users in a more real time sense on the irc
network.

Good luck,

-- 
Seemant Kulleen
Developer and Project Co-ordinator,
Gentoo Linux					http://dev.gentoo.org/~seemant

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