Re: [gentoo-dev] New Portage fork: sys-apps/portage-mgorny

[Kent Fredric <kentnl@gentoo.org>]

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On Sat, 24 Mar 2018 13:44:49 -0700
Zac Medico <zmedico@gentoo.org> wrote:

> That only happens when dependency satisfaction fails by normal means.

And when that happens, it is better to bail and go "Uh oh, something bad",
not "oh, right, lets install something that will likely make things
worse and additional work to fix"

Its a regular occurrence that we have to tell people about this on #gentoo.

> 
> > That default gets people using broken openssl and experimental
> > packages blindly without them ever having intended on getting into
> > experimental waters.  
> 
> If people can't be bothered to understand the meaning of package.mask
> and keywords changes, should they really be using Gentoo?

And its not *entirely* true that this is the case. Toralf used to
complain portage couldn't find a resoultion and would try unmasking
insane stuff in the process of tinderboxing.

But lo and behold, by removing the ability to unmask ** and
package.mask, he reported a significant improvement in the ability to
test.

"RTFM?" is a terrible response to "you have bad defaults that make
things break" because that default is *only* useful to people who would
consider using things that have *zero* expectation that they would work.

And that is not any majority demographic of the Gentoo user base.

Its not a useless feature, but its a feature that should only be
enabled after reading the documentation.

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