Penguin
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About Masked packages

Packages can be flagged as masked for a number of reasons. Mostly they are masked because they might break something, or they WILL break something. These tend to be masked in /usr/portage/profiles/packages.mask, and you can either forcibly install the package (see later), or unmask the package by commenting out the line. Note that this file is rebuilt everytime you emerge sync. There is rumour of support for a packages.unmask file, but this doesn't seem to work (16 Jun 2003)

The other reason packages can be masked is that they are in the 'unstable' branch of the gentoo tree. This is essentially the same as unstable in debian. Sometimes things will break, othertimes they'll be fine. You're on your own.

Installing Masked packages

You can either install the file using an explicit ebuild, eg
emerge /usr/portage/wm-x11/xfce4/xfce4-3.90.ebuild

This will work for all types of masking, however it only works for that one ebuild. You'll find that XFCE 4 depends on a metric assload of other packages, and so you have to manually walk its dependancy tree, installing each one by hand. XFCE 4 is in the 'unstable' branch, and we can tell emerge to allow packages in this branch by setting the 'ACCEPT_KEYWORDS' environment variable to "x86"

For example
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86" emerge xfce4

Will happily build XFCE 4 (actually 3.9.something, its the 4 beta release) and all its depedencies.

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  • ChetanSarva
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