On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 06:44:33PM +0200, Fabian Zeindl wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I'm using gentoo and the best package manager of the world for over one year
> now, and I'm quite satisfied :-).
> One idea I had: I regularly stumble across ebuilds which are masked in
> package.mask because they break certain other packages or something like that.
> It would be genial if portage wouldn't just say
> "this ebuild is masked cause it breaks XYZ", but detect whether I have XYZ
> installed and warns me if so resp. emerges normally otherwise. If I install
> package XYZ some time later portage must of course detect this and say "you
> have package ABC installed, which makes problem with the package you wan't to
> install now, what do you want to do?".
> 
> Is this an insane idea? It would make portage even better if it could resolve
> situations/environments/configurations where emerging/unmerging something will
> cause problems.
You forgot the inverse of it, you've merge the package that's loosely 
masked as you're proposing, portage now has to tell block you from 
merging XYZ (due to the package breaking xyz).

Offhand... I'm not much for this.  The scenarios where it occurs, and 
a package *could* released are a bit rare imo; basically, gain vs 
cost.

> PS: The second question I want to ask: Why are some packages so long marked ~
> unstable when their upstream is stable. Is there a policy how long to mark new
> ebuilds or something like that?
Upstream stability does not match actual stability; we stable 
dependant on our experiences, bugs, and user feedback with a 
particular version.

~harring