On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 8:25 AM, Thomas Kahle <[email protected]> wrote: > On 11/13/2013 12:39 PM, Tom Wijsman wrote: >> On Wed, 13 Nov 2013 10:28:02 +0000 (UTC) >> Martin Vaeth <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> Hello. >>> >>> The new "features" use.stable.mask and package.use.stable.mask >>> have turned maintaining systems with mixed ARCH and ~ARCH keywords >>> into a nightmare: >> >> They are considered unsupported by many; so, going down that path you >> need to be acquainted with Portage enough to keep a consistent system. > > This argument has come up several times, but is it valid?
Honestly, opinions vary on this one and I don't think it is a productive path to go down. I also feel that being able to mix keywords is a big benefit of using Gentoo. I'd rather focus on practical ways to make this easier rather than whether it is desirable. That said, there are always going to be situations where mixing keywords isn't practical. You're not going to run stable chromium against ~arch v8, or mixed keywords between kdelibs and kwin, etc. > We could consider reducing the feature set of portage and live > with the "problems" that arise. When I started using Gentoo a > package could simply not go stable until all dependencies for all > USE flags were also stable. Masking USE flags was reserved to a > short list of very special architecture depend special cases. I don't think going backwards is the solution. Back in the old days packages broke from time to time because we didn't have adequate ways to express dependencies, and I don't think it is a good solution to strip USE flags out of packages when they go stable so that users don't even have the option to use them. It makes more sense to identify what specifically is causing problems and come up with better solutions to them. That said, your original email contained a few separate issues and they're probably best dealt with individually. We're not going to have a common solution for multilib, stable use masking, python-exec, and whatever other issues are lurking beneath the surface. Rich
