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On Mon, 05 Sep 2005 21:09:28 +0100, Stuart Herbert wrote: |
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> Many *users* look on package.masked packages as being dangerous to |
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> install, but are much more willing to run ~arch packages. If you mask a |
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> version of a popular package, you'll get a lot of correspondence asking |
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> you when you'll unmask it, but you won't get much testing feedback to go |
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> with it. Once the package moves to ~arch, the amount of feedback |
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> improves substantially. |
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It's not so much the case that no-one dares try pmasked pkgs. Taking a |
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quick trip through the forum will turn up many examples of people who do. |
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But the longstanding policy with masked pkgs is 'this is unsupported - if |
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it breaks, don't come to us - use at your own risk'. Right now there are |
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plenty of people using the Gnome 2.12 RC or xorg 6.8.99 or gcc 4 or the |
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masked utopia stack, but they know better than to file bugs because it |
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will just be closed as invalid. Personally, the only time i'll file a |
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bug against a masked package is when i have a patch. |
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> Rather than unmask the packages before they were read, I changed to |
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> another approach. I moved the work out of Portage into an overlay |
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> instead. This worked well. It has attracted a bunch of regulars to |
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> #gentoo-apache who have spent the last few months finding the bugs that |
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> existed, and making sure that they're fixed and stay fixed. It looks |
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> likely that we'll get some new devs out of that too :) |
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> |
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> Overlays are easy for larger pieces of work like PHP, Java, |
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> Gnome/Gentopia, but they'll always be small packages where an overlay |
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> feel like too much effort. They may not be the answer to everything. |
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I'd like to see a lot more of this. I haven't used the PHP overlay, but |
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Halcy0n's GCC4 overlay helped centralize a group of testers that ended up |
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getting a lot of major bugs fixed pre-release. The Gentopia overlay takes |
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it a step farther with it's own bug tracker. See, now here is something |
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you know was created specifically for experimenting and testing, and you |
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know that your feedback is wanted and welcomed. |
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--de. |
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