Re: [gentoo-user] Masking for Educational Purposes only ?

[Daniel Pielmeier]

2008/11/24 Helmut Jarausch <jarausch@××××××××××××××××.de>:
> Hi,
>
> portage-2.2.. has been masked.
> /usr/portage/profiles/package.mask tells me why
>
> "In order to ensure that portage-2.1.6 gets sufficient testing,
>  portage-2.2 will be masked in package.mask until portage-2.1.6 has
>  been marked stable."
>
> I feel like someone will try to educate me.
> Yes, I can and will unmask it again, but why
> am I forced to?
>
> I'd prefer if package.mask is used for buggy or dangerous
> packages only.

I will try to explain this a bit from what I know from mailing-lists and IRC.

First there are no problems with portage-2.2. It has been masked
because some features are not ready and thus are blocking
stabilisation. As a conclusion portage-2.1.6 has been branched out
without this features to get a stable version into the tree which has
support for eapi 2 and all other features that are ready.

To get more testing to 2.1.6 version it has been decided to mask 2.2
with the hope more people are using 2.1.6 to get remaining bugs fixed
and to get it stable quickly. Of course some users which are for
instance using kde-4 or other stuff which will need features that are
only in 2.2 will have to unmask portage 2.2 to get the system running.

This is one thing that annoys me a bit of gentoo. There is way to much
information that is not passed to the users, a short announcement
which explains the situation on the homepage, forum or even the
gentoo-user mailing list and everything would be fine. Some things
important for users are often discussed only on IRC or the gentoo-dev
mailing list so they do not reach most of the users. Examples are this
portage masking and the perl package moves to name a few things that
happened recently.

-- 
Regards,
Daniel