Re: [gentoo-dev] Use of use.mask

[Anthony G. Basile]

On 04/30/2011 02:47 PM, Ole Markus With wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I was thinking of adding SVN snapshot ebuilds of PHP to the tree.
> Ebuilds for PHP extensions use USE_EXPAND to decide which slots (and
> thus, which ABIs) of PHP the extension should be built for, much like
> ruby does. A new USE_EXPAND USE flag should therefore be added for the
> SVN snapshot slot. The problem is that the ABI is not stable and should
> only be used by people who 'know what they are doing', and the snapshot
> ebuilds will probably always be without keywords. This will cause some
> dependency problems.
>
> The only solution I could think of would be to add this new USE flag to
> use.mask. But as far as I could tell, use.mask is meant for masking USE
> flags that do not work on certain architectures etc. It is also a bit
> tricky for users to unmask USE flags.
>
> Is this still the best way to do this? Or are there any better ways that
> I did not think of?
>
> Cheers,
> Ole Markus
>

I don't see that this is much different in philosophy than p.masking
experimental/broken ebuilds which we add to the tree for dev only
testing.  In both cases a user who thinks they 'know what they're doing'
can locally unmask, at their own risk.

-- 
Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D.
Gentoo Linux Developer [Hardened]
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