On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 1:08 PM, Nirbheek Chauhan <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:nirbheek@g.o">nirbheek@g.o</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 12:33 AM, Duncan &lt;<a href="mailto:1i5t5.duncan@...">1i5t5.duncan@...</a>&gt; wrote:<br>
&gt; 2) That won&#39;t necessarily stop the bugs from rolling in.  Some devs may<br>
&gt; get tired of live pkg bugs and package.mask it, thus putting up a double-<br>
&gt; barrier to the live ebuild.  If users jump BOTH barriers and fall over<br>
&gt; the ledge, well... maybe they /need/ that Darwin Award! =:^]<br>
&gt;<br>
<br>
</div>We had something interesting happen with policykit. It was masked for<br>
a very long time, and so all users of policykit had<br>
&quot;sys-auth/policykit&quot; in p.unmask. Then it was unmasked, but of course<br>
who bothers cleaning up their local configuration as long as it works?<br>
<br>
Months later, policykit-0.92 was added (masked) which was ABI, API,<br>
UI, everything incompatible. Naturally portage on said users&#39; boxes<br>
was very happy to see such an update on the system and it very<br>
promptly upgraded policykit.<br>
<br>
And of course it completely hosed everything on top of X.<br>
<br>
We received bug reports for this a *long* time after adding it. After<br>
getting sick of duping, and since the new ebuild was broken in a few<br>
ways too (and we had decided to rename policykit-0.92 it to<br>
sys-auth/polkit), we finally decided to remove it.<br>
<br>
Lesson to be learnt: users are morons with short attention spans[1].<br>
But we cannot ignore that fact.<br>
<br><br></blockquote><div><br>In such cases users should be using version specific/version ranges for p.keywords/p.unmask.<br><br>I don&#39;t recall seeing much literature on this practice though with regards to standard recommendations of users and how they should use their own p.keywords and p.unmask.<br>
<br>Maybe a good standard practice would be to *not* use ranged p.masks and have explicit =version p.masks, so that users who use the commonly available scripts that just copy from p.mask  to p.unmask don&#39;t get silently bitten as a consequence. <br>
 <br></div></div>-- <br>Kent <br><br>perl -e  &quot;print substr( \&quot;edrgmaM  SPA NOcomil.ic\\@tfrken\&quot;, \$_ * 3, 3 ) for ( 9,8,0,7,1,6,5,4,3,2 );&quot;<br><br><a href="http://kent-fredric.fox.geek.nz">http://kent-fredric.fox.geek.nz</a><br>