On Mon, 05 Sep 2005 21:09:28 +0100, Stuart Herbert wrote: > Many *users* look on package.masked packages as being dangerous to > install, but are much more willing to run ~arch packages. If you mask a > version of a popular package, you'll get a lot of correspondence asking > you when you'll unmask it, but you won't get much testing feedback to go > with it. Once the package moves to ~arch, the amount of feedback > improves substantially.
It's not so much the case that no-one dares try pmasked pkgs. Taking a quick trip through the forum will turn up many examples of people who do. But the longstanding policy with masked pkgs is 'this is unsupported - if it breaks, don't come to us - use at your own risk'. Right now there are plenty of people using the Gnome 2.12 RC or xorg 6.8.99 or gcc 4 or the masked utopia stack, but they know better than to file bugs because it will just be closed as invalid. Personally, the only time i'll file a bug against a masked package is when i have a patch. > Rather than unmask the packages before they were read, I changed to > another approach. I moved the work out of Portage into an overlay > instead. This worked well. It has attracted a bunch of regulars to > #gentoo-apache who have spent the last few months finding the bugs that > existed, and making sure that they're fixed and stay fixed. It looks > likely that we'll get some new devs out of that too :) > > Overlays are easy for larger pieces of work like PHP, Java, > Gnome/Gentopia, but they'll always be small packages where an overlay > feel like too much effort. They may not be the answer to everything. I'd like to see a lot more of this. I haven't used the PHP overlay, but Halcy0n's GCC4 overlay helped centralize a group of testers that ended up getting a lot of major bugs fixed pre-release. The Gentopia overlay takes it a step farther with it's own bug tracker. See, now here is something you know was created specifically for experimenting and testing, and you know that your feedback is wanted and welcomed. --de. -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
