Regarding the recent expat upgrade problem (I had a box hosed by a blind update and spent a while sorting it out): I suggest that packages have optional Portage release notes, and when an `emerge --sync' is performed, any release notes of the updated packages are cat'ed together and displayed to the user (with `less' or another configured viewer). Packages known to cause problems without some non-trivial emerge (e.g. expat, MySQL, gcc, glibc) could have a warning or a description of the correct sequence of commands to use instead of `emerge -uD world'.
Just my US$0.02 ... -- Michael J. Barillier /// http://www.blackwolfinfosys.net/~blackwolf/ _O_| Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently __O| complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally- OOO| specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
