[gentoo-dev] Arbitrary breakage: sys-fs/cryptsetup

[schism@subverted.org]

Normally I don't take to the skies with this sort of thing, but this was
ridiculous.  In what I am sure was a well-intentioned change, cryptsetup
recently silently lost its default USE=static status.  For one of the
many people actually using cryptsetup in an initrd, this came as a
lovely surprise this morning as I found my new kernel/initrd completely
unbootable.

To compound matters, udev-181's incompatibility with my old kernel (no
DEVTMPFS, separate /usr), and my primary system was completely
unbootable.

Please - if you're going to significantly change functionality that
(whether correct or not) people have come to depend on, have the decency
to at least publish a news article on it.  I may find 'eselect news'
annoying, but I at least read it.  Before we get to bikeshedding, I'm
well aware there were multiple ways to have prevented this, but none of
them were in place [1].  What was in place was default behavior that had
been there for a very long time.


[1] For one, genkernel should bomb out if it can't comply with a
command-line arg instead of just putting non-alert text up.