The facility to "watch" certain packages would be very useful. For example, the file /etc/portage/package.watch could exist with pairs of "app-misc/mypackage Don't upgrade this one yet!" as a reminder. When packages are going to be upgraded, or even perhaps in the output of emerge search too, a user specified message can then remind sysadmins. This would be useful where people are waiting for a certain version of a package (e.g. for feature enhancements: "check if xyz is supported yet"), where people have custom overlays (e.g. bug 77353, "rebuild overlay before upgrading"). It would be very useful where more than one person deals with a lot of Gentoo servers with overlays. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
That would be a cool feature, indeed...
great idea, solves a few of my problems such as - changing apaaches suexec_root requires a customer ebuild, being warned about this would be priceless - exim I have some customer stuff - courier I have an autocreate mailbox patch... at the moment, I have to remember this, and tell my other admin, this idea would *really* improve how I can use portage and overlay.
would be great to see this added
Putting a hold on feature requests for portage as they are drowning out the bugs. Most of these features should be available in the next major version of portage. But for the time being, they are just drowning out the major bugs and delaying the next version's progress. Any bugs that contain patches and any bugs for etc-update or dispatch-conf can be reopened. Sorry, I'm just not good enough with bugzilla. ;)
Reopening for consideration.
I think /etc/portage/package.mask is suitable for this, and it has support for comments which emerge will display automatically. The --autounmask-keep-masks option from bug 372485 may be useful.
