Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
I hate how emerge / portage calls a missing keyword "masked". It's really not the same thing as being in package.mask (so called "hard-masked").
[snip]
Right now, we see package.mask, -*, and sometimes even ~ARCH being used to indicate instability from upstream. For example, the gcc-4.1 ebuilds work perfectly, yet are marked -*. As another example, there was a bit of time when the KDE 3.5_beta2 ebuilds worked fine (and were ~ARCH) but they were package.mask'ed.
Unfortunately we are in such a state that you don't really know if a soft-masked package is soft-masked because the ebuild is unstable or whether the package itself is as yet considered unstable; I don't think the soft-masking is used in a consistent way even though the gentoo devs might believe it is.
With hard-masked packages it's pretty clear that you shouldn't use them unless you *really* know what you're doing.
But with soft-masked packages it's not as clear. Even if it were the case that soft-masking indicates only ebuild instability, the ebuild controls how the package is compiled, installed, configured... A bad ebuild could really mess up your system even if the package itself has no problems.
The handbook clearly suggests that you should avoid even soft-masked packages for production systems, although we would all be able to say where we've used a soft-masked package with no issues.
Recently there was a thread going on about a user with a soft-masked glibc and a problem with "mdns off" in /etc/host.conf; glibc is such a critical system component, imagine what you'd need to do if the soft-masked glibc resulted in a corrupt library, the core library that all of your system components use in one fashion or another. No boot, no shell, no command execution, no remote access to fix, etc. You're left booting from a recovery disk to try to either restore from your latest backup (if you're making backups) or rebuilding components trying to get the system back to a workable state.
To that end, you should consider the consequences of using those soft-masked packages and whether you're willing to deal with them in the face of failures.
-- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
