Re: [gentoo-dev] MySQL 4 still marked unstable?

[Steven Lucy]

On Mon, May 19, 2003 at 06:00:00PM +0200, Patrick Kursawe <phosphan@g.o> said
> Didn't you yet find the -U switch or what's wrong with it?

there are some problems with the -U switch.  for instance say the newest
stable package in portage is foo-1.1, and unstable is foo-1.2-r1.  you really
need that feature that was introduced in version 1.2, so you set
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS and emerge foo-1.2-r1 (or explicitly emerge that ebuild
file).  time goes by and the foo-1.2-r1 is found to be buggy, and it is
replaced by foo-1.2-r2.  emerge -U will not upgrade to this, because your A_K
don't allow it.  as if this weren't a big enough problem by itself, after a
few weeks foo-1.2-r1.ebuild is removed from portage entirely!  -U refuses to
let you stay with a package that it can't find the ebuild for, and it refuses
to upgrade to something that has the wrong KEYWORDS, so instead it /will/
downgrade to foo-1.1, which is almost never the desired behaviour.

what i think many users are looking for is a way to have some unstable and
some stable packages installed at the same time, and some way to upgrade to
the latest available stable/unstable for that package based on your choice
("sticky A_K").  having no way to do this decreases the number of people
using unstable packages, which reduces the amount of testing that gets done
and increases their time-to-stable.  i can understand the difficulties in
coding such a feature, and i understand that it's in the works for upcoming
portage releases, but in the mean-time it's annoying.

Steven

--
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list