Emerge just updated "baselayout". Doing so, it re-installed files and symlinks I had deleted in and below /etc for some reason. For example, I had removed some standard links from the runlevels subdirs to make sure certain things are *never* done automatically. Moreover, I had deleted a file in /etc/ppp. The file is needed for modem PPP, but confuses my ADSL connection... I know that's almost impossible to get correct automagically, but it causes trouble... Idea: In protected dir's, if a file/symlink/dir which has been installed by the previous version no longer exists, don't install that file/symlink/dir from the new version, but install a shadow of it instead (._cfg...).
I do not know if this would be expected behaviour (not installing missing files). Anyhow, I think it could have connection with something else Daniela and I discussed a bit back (Daniel, for this to work, I guess you also need to generate in all cases md5's in edb/config, and not only if the file changed). Not sure, guess will need to ponder on it.
Nick, dont know what you think about this. If it was implemented, it will require much more processing during qmerge, slowing things down a lot I imagine.
I don't think the processing overhead would be that big as during my tests with a file collision check (bug 28228) it processed ~100-200 files per second (Duron 800, really no highend machine). And your check is even simpler ;)
Enhancment, marking it as such (spring cleaning, or at least reorganization :).
I'm a fan of this idea. I play around in /etc/init.d/ a bit, basically removing unneeded/unwanted scripts to unclutter the output of 'rc-status -a'. It's not that huge of a deal, would just be really more convenient than having to re-move a bunch of files every time baselayout is updated.
INSTALL_MASK and bashrc's provide an equivalent functionality to this. Kind of ugly, but it works. Beyond that, having portage just drop certain files if they aren't on the livefs already isn't possible- say you hose up most of etc, and try to re-emerge the package to get back those files. That lil feature now leaves you still screwed. :) Reopen with alternatives please.
Could you please point me to some docu or description of "INSTALL_MASK"? As far as I can tell, INSTALL_MASK can be set to a list of filename wildcards to suppress installation of files matching these wildcards. However, I found some mail stating that these filename wildcards are globbed against the current filesystem. If this is true, only already-existing files can be protected by INSTALL_MASK, because for non-existing files, globbing fails. However, here we are discussing how to protect non-existing (explicitely deleted) files from being reinstalled. If INSTALL_MASK can do this, I'll use it. If not, please fix INSTALL_MASK. Alternatively, I would suggest to have an explicit exception list in some new file in /etc/portage.
