Re: [gentoo-user] What happens with masked packages?

[Dave Nebinger <dnebinger@joat.com>]

Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
> 
> I hate how emerge / portage calls a missing keyword "masked".  It's really 
> not the same thing as being in package.mask (so called "hard-masked").
[snip]
> Right now, we see package.mask, -*, and sometimes even ~ARCH being used to 
> indicate instability from upstream.  For example, the gcc-4.1 ebuilds work 
> perfectly, yet are marked -*.  As another example, there was a bit of time 
> when the KDE 3.5_beta2 ebuilds worked fine (and were ~ARCH) but they were 
> package.mask'ed.

Unfortunately we are in such a state that you don't really know if a 
soft-masked package is soft-masked because the ebuild is unstable or 
whether the package itself is as yet considered unstable; I don't think 
the soft-masking is used in a consistent way even though the gentoo devs 
  might believe it is.

With hard-masked packages it's pretty clear that you shouldn't use them 
unless you *really* know what you're doing.

But with soft-masked packages it's not as clear.  Even if it were the 
case that soft-masking indicates only ebuild instability, the ebuild 
controls how the package is compiled, installed, configured...  A bad 
ebuild could really mess up your system even if the package itself has 
no problems.

The handbook clearly suggests that you should avoid even soft-masked 
packages for production systems, although we would all be able to say 
where we've used a soft-masked package with no issues.

Recently there was a thread going on about a user with a soft-masked 
glibc and a problem with "mdns off" in /etc/host.conf; glibc is such a 
critical system component, imagine what you'd need to do if the 
soft-masked glibc resulted in a corrupt library, the core library that 
all of your system components use in one fashion or another.  No boot, 
no shell, no command execution, no remote access to fix, etc.  You're 
left booting from a recovery disk to try to either restore from your 
latest backup (if you're making backups) or rebuilding components trying 
to get the system back to a workable state.

To that end, you should consider the consequences of using those 
soft-masked packages and whether you're willing to deal with them in the 
face of failures.


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