Re: [gentoo-dev] unmasking packages (was Gentoo's problems)

[Stuart Longland]

George Prowse wrote:
> Caleb Cushing wrote:
>> how about providing me a list of packages that are masked instead of
>> making me read and unmask them one at a time.
> That pretty much defeats the object of them being masked in the first place
>
> So all you can really come up with is speed? If a power user yourself
> can only come up with speed what is an ordinary user going to think
> of... *sigh*

Evidently, you've never had to unmask a large package and test it.  This
is a major complaint I have with Portage.  The reason I haven't brought
it up however, is that I've been waiting until I had the time to have a
look at the code behind `emerge` and see if I can embed the necessary
logic to make this happen.

Try `emerge php` on mips... Yeah, at some point it might be worth
re-keywording it, but right now, one must go though and re-run emerge
about 20 times as each unkeyworded dependency is identified.  On a
modern x86/AMD64 machine, that doesn't take too long, it's just an
annoyance.  On a slow Cobalt server however, it's agonising.

KDE is another which I'd like to point out.  I've got much of KDE 3.5.6
working on Loongson (at the moment, gpgme failing its tests holds me up)
however, this didn't come without much arguing with portage over missing
keywords.  This is for monolithic KDE... I don't even want to think
about the meta-ebuilds for KDE.

Portage itself, does take a long time to load its libraries.  I'm yet to
try Paludis (I'm one of the few MIPS devs that doesn't use it yet), but
do hear good things about it.  Perhaps some of the concepts used in
Paludis could be applied in portage, in order to speed up performance
when searching or querying?

These are again, minor changes, but improvements nonetheless.  To say we
haven't done anything in the last few years, would be a mistake in my
opinion -- a lot has changed behind the scenes that users may not
necessarily be aware of.  I do not see this as being a significant
problem.  Certainly, the focus should be on the quality of the
distribution; not quantity of features.

Regards,
-- 
Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter)              .'''.
Gentoo Linux/MIPS Cobalt and Docs Developer  '.'` :
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   .'.'
http://dev.gentoo.org/~redhatter             :.'

I haven't lost my mind...
  ...it's backed up on a tape somewhere.