I always skip */*-r? kind of update when fix is not critical, especially big softwares which take a lot of time to emerge. kdelibs take me 4 hours to emerge, so as usual, I tried to skip 4.14.15-r1 by adding it to package.mask. But unfortunately previous version is already dropped. I think there is no harm to keep old ebuild around for a while. Cleaning them up when version has bumped isn't seems to too late to me. By keeping them around, it gave us the opportunity to choose whether update or not. So I ask you please don't drop old ebuild too quickly. Reproducible: Always
Obviously you have unmasked ~amd64 packages so the complaint about updates is a bit strange. You will want to upgrade when it actually fixes things, such as 4.14.15-r1 which reverts a change that made some applications crash on exit. And it is the new stable target anyway.
>complaint about updates I don't complain about updates. Of course, updates are much appliciated. I am asking not to drop previous ebuild too quickly, so people who want ignore specific update can have their choice.
You don't need to update it, even if the ebuild is gone. It's still installed. Use --exclude if you don't want it to show up on your emerge calls. If you want to update less often, please consider using the stable tree. Resolving as wontfix.