On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 6:33 PM, Michał Górny <mgo...@gentoo.org> wrote: > Dnia 2013-07-22, o godz. 00:16:31 > hasufell <hasuf...@gentoo.org> napisał(a): >> - users have to run "layman -a foo" ...I hope they will manage (and the >> masking reason will be updated to explain where to look for googleearth >> ebuilds) > > Then to get *a single package* they start using the whole overlay. If > it's a sane overlay, fine. But some overlays really replace a lot of > stuff silently and trigger failures we didn't even imagine before. >
We're starting to drift off topic here, but I've always felt that this is something that could be improved on. I'm not saying that any of this should just be thrown together, but some of the following might be useful: 1. Overlay dependencies (depends on a particular package from a particular overlay). 2. Overlay package.* (accept one version of one package from a particular overlay, mask all packages in an overlay that aren't explicitly unmasked, don't apply package.(un)mask from one overlay to packages in another unless the mask references that overlay specifically, etc). 3. Repository priority (paludis handles this fairly well I think) - where you can control which overlays override which other ones. I've never really liked the all-or-nothing design of overlays as they currently stand. Even simply prioritizing them is a pretty crude approach. It makes them fairly useless for general-purpose distribution of packages. Rich
