arch - in theory stable
~arch - in theory should work, but needs testing
-arch - do not work at all
Just out of curiosity, why are there know broken packages in portage? Wouldn't -arch packages best be handled outside of the official portage tree such as a developers overlay? Couldn't the same be said for pmasked also? If we were to remove pmasked and -arch packages from portage and and handle them via overlays, the portage tree would contain only working versions of programs and testing versions of the same program which would be ~arch'd. This should should suffice for most users; but If they want to run the "broken" programs, they'd download the overlay and install it again. No need to add lines to both package.unmask and package.keywors either. Once broken package is fixed, it should be moved into portage for testing and then finally unarched.
And I apologize in advance if this was brought up before or is just plain stupid.. I'm fairly new to Gentoo development list and this is my first reply :).
Regards,
