Re: [gentoo-dev] package.mask

[AGottinger@t-online.de (Achim Gottinger)]

> The purpose of this design philosophy is to help ensure a working system without
> putting unnecessary restraints on the user.  Apologies for not explaining this
> earlier; I thought you understood the concept behind the packages file.  In any
> case, I hope you like the design -- personally, I think it's a good approach.

Hmm, ok my idea whould mess up the idea of the packages file.

Here is an alternative to the package.mask concept. We can start tagging
packages in the cvs tree.
So by default you whould checkout the latest rc instead of the in
development versions. If you want to
add a development version to your system you can checkout manually.
Instead of using the gentoo version number for tagging we can use
"stable" for all packages not in development.
This should be sufficient for the beginning, but in the future I think
we need to use the version numbers.
The past shows that it is a nice idea to have an allways up to date
system, but some updates can create lots of
unexpectable bugs. To avoid messing up all our users system, we can
instead maintain our different releases 
separate and make only security fixes to them. So you can allways have a
secure rc4,rc5 1.0 1.1 ....

achim~