Re: [gentoo-user] portage getting mixed up with USE?

[Mike Edenfield <kutulu@kutulu.org>]

On 6/23/2011 6:31 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Thursday 23 June 2011 23:06:00 Neil Bothwick did opine thusly:
>>>> b) it breaks the way portage displays his informations.
>>>> Without
>>>> autounmask the display of emerge shows what he is going to
>>>> do. With autounmask it shows what needs to be done.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> That is probably the most evil of all your reasons. There's an
>>> old dev  joke about The Law Of Unintended Consequences, and it
>>> applies here - portage is now suddenly doing something new and
>>> 180 different from what it used to do. The normal response if
>>> "WTF?" followed by lots of indignation
>>
>> Ah, the old "we do it that way because that's the way it's always
>> been done" argument. Yes, it is different, yes, it may be confusing
>> when you first encounter the change - but that doesn't make it bad.
> 
> The thing itself is neither inherently good nor bad. Implementing it 
> in this way is bad.
> 
> Why?
> 
> Because the behaviour changed to something that is the exact opposite 
> without any warning. Portage always used to tell what it will do. Now, 
> simply by leaving the relevant options at the default, it tells me 
> what it should do. How much more contrary to reasonable expectation 
> can you get?

I thought the old behavior was "portage would tell me why it's not going
to do anything", vs. the new behavior of "portage will tell me why it's
not going to do anything, plus offer to fix it for me."

Unless I'm missing something about the pre-auto-unmask behavior? (Which
is entirely likely..)

--Mike