On 05/20/2016 10:01 AM, Michał Górny wrote:
>
> Please review the specification provided. The basic goal is to provide
> an ability to use INSTALL_MASK alike USE flags -- with path groups that
> are well-defined and described in the repository.
>
> [1]:https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:MGorny/GLEP:INSTALL_MASK
>
I like the idea. INSTALL_MASK is currently pretty flaky, and that's what
we tell people to use to block e.g. systemd units. Here's what I gather:
1. The INSTALL_MASK-like feature should support fnmatch() wildcards.
2. Binary packages are not be affected (there's another feature for
that)
3. We can define groups of paths to make certain things (bash
completions, locales, etc.) easy to mask.
All of those are good, but are the details of what actually goes in
INSTALL_MASK left up to the implementation? How would I mask all bash
completions (the bash-completion group) using INSTALL_MASK?
Can you make the spec say that we should be able to mask files whose
names contain spaces? Or is that implicit in the fnmatch() clause?
For the portage implementation, it may be time to ditch the variable and
move to something like /etc/portage/install.mask:
$ cat /etc/portage/install.mask
[bash-completion]
/etc/logrotate.d
read me.txt
With one pattern per line, the spaces thing is easy to deal with. But
this makes me wonder, how is portage supposed to know I want to block
the bash-completion group and not all files named "[bash-completion]"?
