[gentoo-dev] Use of use.mask

[Ole Markus With]

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