Gentoo Archives: gentoo-project

From: Alec Warner <antarus@g.o>
To: Marius Mauch <genone@g.o>
Cc: gentoo-project@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-project] Automation: Making package.mask better
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:55:33
Message-Id: b41005390707231055te8f742ds5bff09fb5d45d511@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-project] Automation: Making package.mask better by Marius Mauch
1 On 7/23/07, Marius Mauch <genone@g.o> wrote:
2 > On Sat, 21 Jul 2007 23:39:51 -0700
3 > "Alec Warner" <antarus@g.o> wrote:
4 >
5 > > I wish to add a few more fields:
6 > >
7 > > Effective-Date: Date the mask goes into effect. This means you can
8 > > mask stuff in the future.
9 > > Expiration-Date: Date the mask ends. This means you can have masks
10 > > that expire after a given time.
11 >
12 > No and no. I don't see a point in either of those, or since when is
13 > (absolute) time a relevant factor for masking status?
14 >
15 > > If Expiration-Date was mandatory, we could essentially have a system
16 > > that cleans out mask files by removing expired masks.
17 >
18 > Please provide use cases where a mask would expire at a given date and
19 > not based on the state of the tree (analog for Effective-Date).
20
21 The best case is a last-rites mask. Given an Expiration-Date you can
22 alert on masks that are old (by data) as opposed to what we do now,
23 which is guess based on haphazard data in the mask and whether the
24 package is in the tree or not.
25
26 Security masks are a subset of this and could benefit from an expiration.
27
28 We could drop the requirement of 'the package mangler expires masks
29 based on expiration' and just use the expiration by parsers so that
30 people can monitor masks and determine if/when stuff should happen.
31
32 Effective-Date has less of a use case, most people don't forget to
33 mask things (or if they do, it gets fixed 'real quick now').
34
35 >
36 > > Another thing I wish to address is the addition of entries in
37 > > package.mask at the top of the file. I think this restriction just
38 > > makes automation more difficult. I can't just append new entries to
39 > > the end of the file, I have to read in the file and figure out by some
40 > > hardcoded comment strings where the actaul masks begin, and then
41 > > insert text right below the examples. This is horrible. Can we nuke
42 > > that convention, why are new entries at the top?
43 >
44 > I think that convention comes from the fact that package.mask also acts
45 > as a changelog for itself, and the newest entries are generally the
46 > more "interesting" ones.
47 >
48 > Marius
49
50 So 'newer' correlates to 'more interesting'?
51 How does that mean 'new entries go at the top'?
52 --
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