Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] [PATCH] keyword anti-match (foo/-foo) overrides other matches

[Daniel Barkalow]

On Tue, 28 Nov 2006, Zac Medico wrote:

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> Daniel Barkalow wrote:
> > If the configuration has keywords "foo bar", and a package has "-foo
> > bar", mask the package ("masked by -bar keyword").
> >
> > This is the sensible behavior if we ever make use of listing multiple
> > keywords in the configuration, which is currently implemented but not
> > used for anything.
>
> Personally, I'd prefer not to support -foo or -* in the KEYWORDS of
> an ebuild.  For one thing, seems like it's trying to accomplish
> something similar to what package.mask is intended for.

It's documented in the Ebuild HOWTO (at least, -foo). And the current 
state is sort of broken: if you manage to get -foo in your 
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS, you can build a known-broken package, but you can never 
build a package that doesn't have -foo/~foo/foo. So you can only build a 
package if you know it doesn't work.

I'd say, make it impossible to set -foo (or -*) in ACCEPT_KEYWORDS. People 
who want to build -foo packages can use * (or ~*) in their 
package.keywords, which actually gives you the latest version that's 
stable somewhere (or testing somewhere).

With my patch, you'd additionally need -foo in package.keywords to build a 
-foo package, but then it means "don't worry about my foo keyword", which 
is appropriate and really is the usual incremental stack thing.

Incidently, I think with current trunk a package.keywords value of "-x86" 
means "use an ebuild if and only if it is broken on x86", meaning that if 
a newer version actually works, users using the broken version won't 
upgrade. I bet that's not really what people want.

> Another problem is that is uses -foo and -* in completely different ways
> than they are used elsewhere in portage (for negation of values in
> an incremental stack).

I think KEYWORDS (as opposed to ACCEPT_KEYWORDS) being thought of as an 
incremental stack is sort of broken. (Not that it isn't done, but I think 
that KEYWORDS in eclasses is just evil and generally wrong; check out 
enlightenment.eclass and x11-wm/e/e-9999.ebuild for weird and wrong.)

But maybe !foo would be more appropriate anyway for "don't match if foo". 
It might confuse people if what you do to unmask a "!foo" package is 
"-foo *" (meaning "hide my foo keyword, match anything that works"), not 
"!foo". Although I think the real way of unmasking these things should be 
to put a modified version in your overlay.

	-Daniel
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