Created attachment 462278 [details] Discussion with paludis devs about the issue. Use flags have been masked for different reasons in gentoo. Portage provides an easy mechanism (related to overriding packages masks) to override use-flag masks, while paludis does not because of lacking PMS spec in this point. So I request, that PMS will specify in future versions, if it should be possible to override masked use flags and if yes, how the process should be in order to end the divergence of portage and paludis in this point.
Files of local configuration of package managers (/etc/portage in case of Portage) are intentionally outside of scope of PMS. Ciaran probably meant something else than what you are suggesting, but it is unclear what exactly.
Not clear to me what feature you are asking for here. If this is about package manager configuration then it is indeed outside of the scope of PMS.
The issue described in the attachement just came up again, that I cannot unmask USE flags in paludis (see bug 656048). Ciaranm claims, that gentoo devs are abusing the USE flag masking for things like "No stable libressl yet" and says it should only be used for things like "yes, really, you shouldn't be turning on USE=sparc on x86 to avoid bringing in epiphany as a dependency of gnome" So please, introduce two different levels of masking use flags in PMS to cover both cases or specify in PMS what use flags are there for. I just want my tree unbroken, so I don't really care what the resolution is as long as it allows me to install the things I want... Thank you!
(In reply to Kilian from comment #3) > Ciaranm claims, that gentoo devs are abusing the USE flag masking for things > like "No stable libressl yet" and says it should only be used for things > like "yes, really, you shouldn't be turning on USE=sparc on x86 to avoid > bringing in epiphany as a dependency of gnome" The devmanual documents both purposes of use.masking: https://devmanual.gentoo.org/profiles/use.mask/index.html - Masking hardware-specific feature flags. [...] - Disabling unavailable soft dependencies. [...] This section is basically unchanged since 2006, so it is certainly not a "recent mistake". Otherwise, I believe that comment #1 is accurate: > Files of local configuration of package managers (/etc/portage in case of > Portage) are intentionally outside of scope of PMS.
'No stable libressl yet' is definitely a case for *use.stable.mask, and I don't think it has any other purpose.
