First of all, thanks for the reply and clarification. It's always good to hear from an actual developer when I start ranting. [I know I could always go pick a fight on gentoo-dev, but I'll reserve that for when I've got a justifiable beef, and not just a half-baked rant. ;)]
On Friday 24 February 2006 11:31, Ciaran McCreesh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote about 'Re: [gentoo-user] What happens with masked packages?': > Top level package.mask means there's something wrong with the upstream > package. Often this is because it's a beta release. It can also be used > for major ebuild changes. Okay, that's clearer, though I still wish "beta" was more cleanly separated from "broken" -- While betas generally are broken to some degree, they are purposely put out there so users will file the bugs upstream. While I suppose the comments in package.mask do provide a method for determining when it's "safe" to unmask a beta, it's difficult to automatically handle betas. Under my system you just set ACCEPT_UPSTREAM="BETA" and you get beta packages without the broken ones, automatically. > ~arch means a package is a candidate for going into arch after further > testing, if said testing does not turn up new bugs. This means that > both the ebuild *and* the package should be likely to be stable. So, betas shouldn't ever be ~arch? Or is your definition of stable broad enough to include betas? > -* means the package is in some way architecture or hardware > independent (e.g. a binary only package), and so will only run on archs > that are explicitly listed. So, I guess glibc-2.3.6-r3.ebuild is using -* incorrectly? > Any package setting KEYWORDS="-*" and nothing else is abusing -*, and > will flag a warning on the QA checkers. You mean like gcc-4.1.0_pre20060219.ebuild? Sorry if I come off too critically [1]. I do see an unclean separation of upstream-stable vs. ebuild-stable in the portage system and I'd like to see it fixed, but everyday I appreciate how much work goes in to maintaining the portage tree and improving the gentoo experience. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy [1] Also, sorry I'm just a squeaky wheel instead of actively trying to fix the problem, I know there are more constructive things to do (GLEP, experimental portage backages, etc.) besides rant on the user list. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
