Am Dienstag, 26. Februar 2013, 19:13:18 schrieb Tom Wijsman:
> On Tue, 26 Feb 2013 18:37:16 +0100 (CET)
> 
> "Peter Gantner \(nephros\)" <gentoo@nephros.org> wrote:
> > Actually I have always wondered why the kernels are SLOTted by
> > complete version and not just series. I imagine many peoples lives
> > would be easier if they could just unmask xxx-sources:3.4 and
> > therefore always get the current "upstream-stable" version of their
> > preferred kernel.
> > 
> > But then there are probably good reasons for the way it is done. (Or,
> > maybe, it is a holdover from 2.6.xx days where the two dots made more
> > sense for SLOTs?)
> 
> As an easy way to keep a single kernel version from being unmerged by
> a kernel upgrade in Portage, I think.
> 
>     emerge gentoo-sources:3.7.9

But why would you want that? I think normally its more likely that a user 
wants to stick to the seriens (e.g. :3.7) so that he/she receives security 
updates as well as minor fixes.

If you really wanted to stick to a particular version you can always mask any 
version greater than that similar to what you wrote yourself below:

echo ">=sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-3.7" >> /etc/portage/package.mask

[snip]
 
> If you were to make the SLOTS branch based you would get rid of the
> mask line in above example;

right


> but its side effect is that it would also
> get rid of the easy SLOT syntax which will require you to specify
> the full ATOM specification whenever you want to keep a version
> around, or unmerge another. This is not worth the change...
> 
> Of course, this is just one approach to it; feel free to share a
> different work flow if your approach differs from the above one.
> 

First, if you remove any gentoo-sources package it will never remove the 
kernel or modules that have been built from it. So you will always keep the 
kernel that may be important if a newer one has problems for example. 
Regardless of removing the sources or not.

Then, I think using SLOTs for single versions is not really what SLOTs are 
made for. From what I understand, for a *single* *particular* version of any 
package you have ATOMs in portage and for a branch or a group of versions that 
belong together somehow you have SLOTs.

I personally would like to see this scheme for kernels too. Be it gentoo-
sources or hardened-sources.

-Marc
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