On Saturday 30 September 2006 04:40, Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò wrote:
> This is a discussion to follow up bug #149508 [1].

Posted on the bug before noticing there was a -dev thread.

"""
Just about everybody has the wrong idea here.

1) Specifying <sys-libs/glibc-2.4 in packages *does* mask >=sys-libs/glibc-2.4
and thus a corresponding entry in package.mask

2) What should be done is to specify >=sys-libs/glibc-2.4 and leave masking 
out altogether for packages

The reason that package.mask was added to profiles was so that masking of 
atoms in packages could be killed off and it could become just a list of 
required packages.
"""

Like Marius said, using packages to both define what's required of "system" 
and for masking packages is bad design. That and the hope of eventually being 
able to kill off profiles/package.mask are the only reasons package.mask was 
introduced into profiles.

<snip stuff that Mike responded to correctly>

> I cannot find myself any reason for such a behaviour change, but I'm open
> to be proven wrong.

The original reason for specifying masking in both packages and package.mask 
was that there were portage versions that didn't look at package.mask. That 
was a long time ago though, so masking should really be dropped from packages 
altogether at this late stage.

However, masking in packages only is still supported. If there is a reason 
that the plans for killing off that support should be suspended, that's also 
viable.

--
Jason Stubbs

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