Hi all
no flame bait or anything but IMHO some packages are way too much in the
masked state. I don't know the exact QA policy but it's probably do not
annoy users by installing bleeding-edge software let the brave ones
unmask explicitely. This is fine but I think it's applied to generically
While I understand that few people would want the latest glibc, XFree
snapshot or KDE form CVS, masking also applies to standalone programs
which don't really affect general system stability. Many of these are
programs in active development with pretty frequent releases where the
developers are looking for feedback and where they generally release
when they consider they improved.There are probably counter-examples
too though...
Ex: ebuilds for subversion , distcc, valgrind, scons  are either
entirely masked or generally lagging behind a couple of releases wrt the
'unstable' ebuild.
The policy that 'if for an amount of time there are no bugs reported
against' they are made stable is again two-edged: there's less testing
of latest releases so only a smaller procent of the gentoo crowd
actually provides feedback to their development. More like those RPM
based distros :)

Especially because many tools I find are undeservingly masked are
developer oriented so there's a greater chance feedback will be sane and
prompt.

I'd propose to loosen this policy a bit, but then again who am I?

Jani

cc: please

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