Re: [gentoo-user] Can't get mozilla-sunbird

[Holly Bostick]

Norberto Bensa schreef:
> Nick Rout wrote:
>
>>ACCEPT_KEYWORDS has been deprecated for a very long time.
>
>
> But you can still use ACCEPT_KEYWORDS in /etc/make.conf if you want the whole
> system to be ~x86. Or is there a better/recommendable way?
>

Yes, ACCEPT_KEYWORDS is a valid variable name for /etc/make.conf.

It is just deprecated for "on-the-fly" usage, as follows:

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~arch" emerge whatever

The above is a very bad thing to do, and not because of some judgement
call, but because it will cause you nothing but grief in the future.

If you do something like that, the problem is that Portage will *not*
remember that you authorized ~arch for "whatever" and the dependencies
of "whatever", because you didn't authorize it, which authorization is
carried out in /etc/make.conf for global settings, or
/etc/portage/package.keywords for individual applications-- all you did
was hack Portage temporarily to allow this app through its gateway.

So when you next do an emerge world (or an emerge whatever), Portage
will become horribly upset that there is an ~arch package installed,
when it knows that all that is allowed are the stable arch packages.

So it will downgrade "whatever" to stable. It may or may not downgrade
the dependencies to stable, or may only dowgrade some of them. Which is
all very well and good (unless of course you really wanted the unstable
version), until you do another emerge -D world, and one of the unstable
dependencies which was not downgraded, or was now marked stable (making
it OK), wants to upgrade "whatever" again (because it is a dependency of
"whatever version 2" not the "whatever version 1.5" you have installed),
which will attempt upgrade whatever, but will then be forced to
downgrade it immediately thereafter (because whatever version 2 is still
not allowed on the system).

Trust me, it's extremely ugly and totally not worth it.

If you want to unmask a specific package without going to ~arch totally,
add the package, and its dependencies if necessary, to
/etc/portage/package.keywords. It's a bit more trouble at the start, but
a lot less trouble in the end than using ACCEPT_KEYWORDS in an emerge
command, unless you really mean to only *actively* test whether you want
the unstable version of the package.

In that case, it is useful, because if you find you don't want the
package, Portage will downgrade it automatically for you (or you can do
it yourself, in either case, Portage will not get all confused), and if
you do want it, you can then add the authorization to
/etc/portage/package.keywords, so Portage knows to keep it.

HTH,
Holly
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