The latest libevent alpha release (2.0.4) has been working fine for me with tmux for more than a month now. However, the previous alpha release 2.0.3 was buggy and caused strange problems. Therefore, probably the easiest thing to do would be to remove libevent-2.0.3 from the tree (it's pmasked anyway and 2.0.4 is available for users running the alpha releases) and allow tmux to depend on dev-libs/libevent with no version restrictions.
I thought about that, initially. However, since it's a completely different API (I don't know the full details, but I think upstream renamed some functions, and moved the old declarations into a compat header), and app-misc/tmux is developed with the stable branch of dev-libs/libevent (more precisely 1.3e plus some patches from SVN) I restricted the dependency. Don't know if unrestricting it might be a problem in the future (for example, if someday 2.x is released as stable). So, yes, I think for now I'll probably remove it. Not today, though. I'm quite busy with real life. Thanks for the report.
The API changed somewhat even between 1.4.12 and 1.4.13 so restricting it now should perhaps not be needed for app-misc/tmux. As for keeping 2.* unstable and masked - yes - unless upstream says so, it stays that way.
(In reply to comment #2) > The API changed somewhat even between 1.4.12 and 1.4.13 so restricting it now > should perhaps not be needed for app-misc/tmux. As for keeping 2.* unstable and > masked - yes - unless upstream says so, it stays that way. Just to be clear, this bug's purpose wasn't aimed at changing the unstable and masked status of libevent-2.* since they are currently alpha releases, but instead to allow tmux to build against the latest libevent alpha release since it works fine.
Thanks for your input, Jeroen. I've unrestricted the dependency. At least, while its masked. Will see how upstream development goes, but if it's unmasked I'll probably restrict it again to prevent the users (even the ones from testing) from using unsupported software per upstream. I've also added sys-libs/ncurses to {R,}DEPEND for correctness (bug #303927). Thanks for the report.
