On Monday 12 April 2010 18:33:21 KH wrote: > Am 12.04.2010 14:57, schrieb Alan McKinnon: > [...] > > > 2. when devs commit to ~arch, they tend to run ~arch on their test boxes. > > Issues are easy to spot and get fixed quickly. If you have a mixture of > > the two, then you have a combination that no-one but you is using, and > > it will not have been tested. The odds are good that you will often run > > into problems that are hard to trace (conflicting versions of packages). > > Running ~arch is actually more stable than a mixture as many folk have > > those packages and there are more eyeballs on it. > > Hi, > > someone always brings that up. I think it might be right when mixing > packages randomly. But not everybody is doing that. > Let's say: I only like to have personas for firefox. Unmasking firefox, > xulrunner, nss and two more will not bring you in the problem mentioned. > In general I believe this is true for any program as long as it doesn't > need a general library or anything like that unmasked.
What you say is true enough - I usually recommend folks unmask portage as well to get the automated blocker resolving featurs and sets. But it usually doesn't end there. Once users have a recent Firefox, they probably eventually unmask gnome as well, openrc, etc, etc and before you know it, you have a mess. So, in the rare case of a user who can discipline himself to say within the limits you describe, your advice is fine. But that's a theoretical situation :-) and the real one is quite different in my experience. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
