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

[Arve Barsnes <arve.barsnes@gmail.com>]

On 23 March 2018 at 14:27, Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 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).

Unless I'm misunderstanding, this is possible already in package.mask?
If the mask is not permanent (for testing, as you mention), would
there be any benefit in having it in profile instead?

Putting misc/foo::gentoo in package.mask works fine either way.
Probably <misc/foo-4::gentoo works as well, for your scenario above.

I use this for the opposite scenario, I have */*::overlay in
package.mask, and unmask only a particular package in package.unmask,
to avoid bringing in a lot of overlay packages without having a
particular need.

Arve