Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: "Michał Górny" <mgorny@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] New Portage fork: sys-apps/portage-mgorny
Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2018 08:02:32
Message-Id: 1521878540.1070.0.camel@gentoo.org
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] New Portage fork: sys-apps/portage-mgorny by Kent Fredric
1 W dniu sob, 24.03.2018 o godzinie 20∶02 +1300, użytkownik Kent Fredric
2 napisał:
3 > On Fri, 23 Mar 2018 11:53:40 +0100
4 > Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o> wrote:
5 >
6 > > Still, masking is the wrong way to express such preferences. If you
7 > > package.mask sys-devel/gcc then you say that something is wrong with
8 > > that package. Which I believe is not what you want to express here.
9 >
10 > I might have a better usecase for adding masks from overlays.
11 >
12 > But its more for the usecase of "there isn't something wrong with that
13 > package", but the more frequent usecase of "Portage is stupid and so we
14 > have masks to coerce the right behaviour"
15 >
16 > For example, if I had an overlay that's sole purpose was to
17 > test/transition experimental versions of Perl, where the presumption
18 > was that by installing said overlay, that you wished to upgrade to that
19 > version of Perl, it might make sense to employ masks to prevent portage
20 > doing dumb things.
21 >
22 > And by "Dumb things", I mean some of the common problems I see where
23 > portage tries to solve a blocker by downgrading Perl....
24 >
25 > Its much simpler to just author a blacklist of "Look, these are things
26 > that are known to be a mess, don't even consider installing them, with
27 > a nice description of why this is nonsense"
28 >
29 > Trying to achieve it by any other means simply tempts the problem to
30 > reappear in another form, because everything *other* than package.mask
31 > will have portage try to flip the USE flag to try to make it work, and
32 > end up with people needing --backtrack=1000 and having it still not
33 > work.
34 >
35 > package.mask is at least a "look, we know this is nonsense, don't even
36 > explore this line of reasoning" blunt instrument.
37
38 ...except that it is also used to say 'this is experimental version,
39 unmask at will' and Portage wants to unmask stuff for you anyway. Well,
40 I mean the default configuration of Portage, not mine.
41
42 --
43 Best regards,
44 Michał Górny

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-dev] New Portage fork: sys-apps/portage-mgorny Kent Fredric <kentnl@g.o>