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.
I think you have to distinguish between packages beeing in p.mask because they really need a lot of testing and should only be tested by users that are able to fix their system themselves and packages that are in p.mask because they're horribly broken. I filed 4 bugs about gnome 2.12 without adding a single patch, 3 of them got closed a day later.
-- Simon Stelling Gentoo/AMD64 Operational Co-Lead [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
