On Wed, 21 May 2014 18:41:28 -0400
David Abbott <dabbott@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Hi Everyone,
> We are putting together this months GMN [1] Looking for some content
> to add to the "Tip of the month" section.
> Regards
> David
> 
> [1] http://blogs.gentoo.org/news

You can create a simple shell function like this:

whymask() {
    find /usr/portage/profiles/ -name '*.mask' -exec \
    	awk -vRS= "/${*/\//.}/ {
    		print \" \" FILENAME \":\", \"\n\" \"\n\" \$0 \"\n\"
    	}" {} + | less
}

You can do `whymask sys-kernel/gentoo-sources` to get reasons as to why
a particular package is masked; very handy to quickly check something
up, especially for USE flag masks which Portage doesn't explain.

You can do `whymask Gnome 3.12` to get the entire GNOME 3.12 mask,
piping it to `grep -v mask: > /etc/portage/package.unmask/gnome3` then
allows you to quickly update your GNOME 3.12 unmask; if you want this to
happen on sync, you can put this line in /etc/portage/postsync.d/gnome3
and make it executable such that it'll be ran after every sync.

The magic trick here is that awk -vRS= "/.../" matches paragraphs; as
the record separator is empty, it takes the blank lines.

-- 
With kind regards,

Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
Gentoo Developer

E-mail address  : TomWij@gentoo.org
GPG Public Key  : 6D34E57D
GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2  ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D