[gentoo-dev] New ebuild metadata to mark how robust the package is?

[Daniel Bradshaw]

Hi all,

It occurs to me that my work flow when doing updates follows a fairly
predictable (and probably common) pattern.
The obvious next step is to wonder why no one though of automating it...

When doing updates I tend to look through the package list and classify
things based on how likely they are to break.
Some packages, like findutils, are pretty robust and generally just get on
with working.
Other packages, like apache and ssh, need are more fragile and need plenty
of configuration.

Packages from the second group want emerging on their own, or in small
groups, the better to keep an eye out for notices about things that might
break, to update configs, and to check that they're running happily.

Once the update list is reduced to packages from the first group it's
fairly safe to run emerge -u world and not worry about things exploding
too badly.


So as I say, it occurs to me that most people probably follow some
variation of this selective upgrade method.
It might be handy to have some kind of metadata in the ebuilds that can be
used to indicate a package that is "demanding".
Then that flag could be used to highlight the package on a dep tree, or
optionally to block the emerge unless the package is specified explicitly.

`emerge -vaut @safe` would be kinda useful.

Just a thought.

Regards,
Daniel