On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 8:12 AM, hasufell <hasuf...@gentoo.org> wrote: > Also, those masks are rarely short-term in practice, because well, see > this thread.
Is there any evidence to support this statement? You only notice masks when they're a problem, and these kinds of masks tend to be a problem only if they're long-term. I certainly have no issues with avoiding masks for testing long-term, unless it is for something like an upstream beta series of releases (but I'd call that masking for beta, not testing). > Developer overlays are widely used. So yes, ~arch users will be testing > it, probably even arch users. It also limits the potential damage for > the user, because he can very easily toss out the crap by just > removing/masking the whole overlay instead of going on adventure reading > broken portage output. > If I want three users following a bug to test something, it is far easier to tell them to just unmask it than to tell them to go install my developer overlay. Also, right now you can't easily pull in just one package from an overlay, so they get the benefit of installing whatever else is in my overlay. And as I stated previously creating an overlay for one package is unnecessary work. I'm not saying that we should be leaving stuff in the tree for six months for "testing" - just that there are cases where it can be convenient to have a short-term mask. Rich
