Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> On 19:18 Mon 02 Mar     , Alistair Bush wrote:
>> Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> 
> Could you explain what you see as the important difference that makes 
> package.mask bad and a separate overlay good?
> 

Contributors sometimes have difficulty following standards (hell even 
dev's do).  I have little confidence that would also be able to actually 
add packages to package.mask without breaking anything else.
As an example we had a contributor break the manifests of a dozen or so 
packages because he updated the Copyright header then couldn't get the 
ebuild to manifest.  I can imagine someone committing dev-java/ant-core 
to the file.  That and there are 325 ebuilds [1] in java-experimental. 
Masking even 1/2 of them separately would be a complete nightmare.

I also note that sunrise doesn't seem to do this either.

Also no ebuilds are ever marked stable,  so it should be easy for 
someone to just add an entry in their package.keywords file.

And what is stopping a user from wanting to have their own overlay, that 
uses java-overlay ( or java-experimental or any other overlay ) 
packages.  Are we to say that we shouldn't allow tools to have support 
for this.  I think that it is a nature progression that if we are to 
allow overlays to extend the portage tree that we should allow overlays 
to extend other overlays.

[1] java-experimental $ find . -iname '*.ebuild' | wc -l