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

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 6:59 AM, Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>>>>> On Fri, 23 Mar 2018, Roy Bamford wrote:
>
>> games-emulation/sdlmame is masked. I have a higher version in my
>> overlay than the one in the tree and it gets masked too.
>> Its not a problem to me as I know how to manage it.  Its just untidy.
>
> You still don't need a repository specific mask for this. Version
> specific masking and unmasking is entirely sufficient to express that
> the higher version is fine.
>

I think it would be best to step back from terms like "masking" and
focus more on the intended behavior.

It sounds to me that one of the intended behaviors is to tell portage
that for a particular package we want to ignore a particular
repository entirely.  Suppose for example an overlay contains
misc/foo-3, and the main repo introduces misc/foo-4.  Perhaps we want
portage to stick with foo-3 from the overlay.  However, if the overlay
adds foo-4, or foo-4.1 we want this installed.  A version mask would
not really cover this use case.

IMO this sounds like a useful feature.  Having it in profiles could
probably also be useful in some testing scenarios, such as when making
changes to a large number of packages that are already in the main
tree (think something analogous to a feature branch in git, where the
master branch continues to advance).

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the intent here, but I would suggest that
we describe the end goal in emails like these otherwise people focus
on the implementation details first.

-- 
Rich