[gentoo-doc] Gentoo Best Practices

[Michael Smith]

marienz pointed out on #gentoo that there's not much documentation on Gentoo 
Best Practices. I started to think about what this means.

In General:
I guess "Best Practices" would be stuff that most people already know how to 
do, but do in different ways. There are more and less "Gentoo-like" ways of 
doing things. Of course, the docs team may already have a definition for 
"Gentoo-like", but I suggest it means a more maintainable or more flexible method.


More Specifically:
I'm trying to generalize "best practices" here, but first let me get us on the 
same page by being specific. The topic in question on #gentoo was keyword 
unmasking. Besides the portage man page and some brief pointers on the wiki, 
there's not a lot of documentation on the syntax of package.keywords. There are 
better and worse ways to go about unmasking. One of the worst ways is to use 
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS. It's difficult to maintain (maximizes your chance of hitting a 
broken package *or* dep), nearly impossible to reverse, and fairly inflexible 
in configuration, because it treats every package the same.

A better way might to use the tilde-version method of keywording for explicitly 
installed packages, and the plain atom method for keyword-masked dependencies 
not explicitly in the world file. This method would be flexible (done on a 
package-by-package basis, with individual dependency control), maintainable (if 
the explicitly-installed package's stable version is higher than the version 
number in package.keywords, then the stable version is used, and the 
dependencies' versions still go no higher than expressed in the explicitly 
installed package's ebuild), and reversible.


The Point:
It's fine if you disagree with that particular suggestion for a best practice 
the point of this email is to suggest that there ought to be some documentation 
of best practices. So far the docs team has done a great job of demonstrating 
how to get things done. The best practices doc could answer those of us who, on 
occasion wonder *why* we do things a certain way.


What do you think?
-Mike
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