I dont want every package to merge to be "unstable" (~x86). Lately I wanted to merge the latest gnome-packages, which includes about ~50 masked packages. So I wrote a small bash-script which tries to merge the given package: if the output contains a "masked by" the masked package and the reason (~arch | package.mask) are grepped out and added to the designated file(s). You can find the script following the link above to the german gentoo forum (code & output), in addition i'll add it as an attachment to this bugreport. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: (if you use arch instead of ~arch!) 1. echo "gnome-base/gnome ~x86" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords 2. emerge gnome Actual Results: portage exits with "foo is masked by bar". Expected Results: portage should add the masked packages needed to /etc/portage/package.{keywords,unmask}. perhabs there would be a bool-switch in /etc/make.conf to enable/disable this feature, aswell a switch to unmask the exact version or the whole package (when package is masked by packages.mask). if you need more (bash) code please tell me, atm i'm not able to do some python-voodoo :(
Created attachment 70839 [details] "supermerge" script
Masked status is different from unstable keywording. What you're suggesting is effectively castrating masked status so it means nothing, which isn't going to occur Consider if I had realplayer package.keyworded; a unstable version is package.masked due to security issues. Automatically unmasking it would expose me to that version with holes in it, despite the fact it's masked, and the only thing I told portage to do was let me use ~arch versions of the pkg.