Re: [gentoo-dev] first council meeting

[Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>]

On Friday 16 September 2005 04:25 pm, Daniel Ostrow wrote:
> His point (and it's an unfortunately valid one) as I understand it is
> that our user base has been (mis)educated to avoid packages in p.mask
> for fear of breaking things too badly. As such it gets an inherently far
> smaller test base then packages in ~arch do.

i [rightly] fear package.mask packages most of the time.  we stick things in 
there that have security issues, or are known to be badly broken in some way, 
or wont work in subprofiles for archs (think glibc-specific packages masked 
in a uclibc profile).  at the sametime, we use package.mask for things that 
*should* work fine, but we dont know yet.  i wouldnt mind a restricted 4th 
level of masking here:

arch stable
~arch unstable
?arch should work fine, but not 100% sure yet
package.mask known to be broken in some way

it's also a pita to maintain package.mask since we're storing information 
about specific ebuilds outside of the ebuild itself, and it tends to suffer 
badly from bitrot
-mike
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list