Re: [gentoo-user] baselayout2/openrc question

[Alan McKinnon]

On Tuesday 02 February 2010 23:40:17 Mike Edenfield wrote:
> On 2/2/2010 3:48 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > No, you completely misunderstand what stable, unstable and masked mean.
> >
> > You are using stable (and call it unstable which is wrong). What you call
> > masked is actually called unstable. Masked is something else entirely.
> >
> > Do not confuse these terms. They have *exact* meaning.
>
> Has there ever been any discussion on coming up with more precise
> wording for portage's error messages?  I suspect a lot of confusion
> between masked/keyworded comes from the fact that portage calls them all
> "Masked", e.g.:
>
> !!! All ebuilds that could satisfy "=app-editors/vim-7.2.303" have been
> masked.
> !!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your
> request:
> - app-editors/vim-7.2.303 (masked by: ~amd64 keyword)
>
> Not that I came up with any better wording off the top of my head, but
> is the portage team open to suggestions?  Or has this issue been beaten
> to death already?


"mask" is a computer term. It means something that defines an exclusion list. 
All packages in gentoo have masks, even if they are null. "Stable" can be 
considered to be a mask, it just happens to be empty so is always available on 
a system where the arch matches.

When the devs talk about "hard masking" they mean something with an entry in 
packages.mask. Other terms are completely understood: arch, ~arch, etc.

When users miscomprehend the terminology, it's not a failure in the 
terminology it's a failure by the user. Human languages are like that. No 
matter how well you try and nail down a definition for all time, users of the 
language will always try to change stuff.

The current terms work well. Changing them is unlikely to be well received  as 
they are so deeply entrenched already.
-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com