[gentoo-user] package masked perl left and right... what now??

[Michael Higgins]

After the better part of an hour spent manually unmasking inexplicably newly-masked dependencies of installed packages, I finally:

grep dev-perl /usr/portage/profiles/package.mask >> /etc/portage/package.unmask

... so I could !@#$%^&*()_ get on with an updated system.

So, did anyone on this list have forewarning that gentoo's perl maintainability was about to be trashed?  Or like, did I miss some new portage feature that would have solved this for me?

(I emailed the dev apparently responsible for this borkage directly, but he hasn't replied, yet.)

I've often wondered (more and more often now it seems) where I can get a heads up that the devs are about to cause major pain. Is there such a beast?

Never do I see an announcement on the -dev list like, "hey guys, check it out: next week I'm gonna make perl users maintaining Gentoo servers wish they used python instead", or something useful like this. '-)

Any thoughts or insight to this from the list?

Cheers,

-- 
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 michael.higgins[at]evolone[dot]org