Normally I don't take to the skies with this sort of thing, but this was ridiculous. In what I am sure was a well-intentioned change, cryptsetup recently silently lost its default USE=static status. For one of the many people actually using cryptsetup in an initrd, this came as a lovely surprise this morning as I found my new kernel/initrd completely unbootable.
To compound matters, udev-181's incompatibility with my old kernel (no DEVTMPFS, separate /usr), and my primary system was completely unbootable. Please - if you're going to significantly change functionality that (whether correct or not) people have come to depend on, have the decency to at least publish a news article on it. I may find 'eselect news' annoying, but I at least read it. Before we get to bikeshedding, I'm well aware there were multiple ways to have prevented this, but none of them were in place [1]. What was in place was default behavior that had been there for a very long time. [1] For one, genkernel should bomb out if it can't comply with a command-line arg instead of just putting non-alert text up.
