I want to mask Gnome 2.22

[terracotta_shore]

Yes, you read that right. That's mask, not unmask, Gnome 2.22.

Explanation: while playing with the Gnome version of a couple of binary distros (Ubuntu and Mandriva) I discovered that if I copied files from a mounted fat32 usb drive, the file date/time stamps were not preserved, but updated to the current time. This is very bad. Further investigation showed that this affected mounted ntfs and ext3 filesystems as well. This is not a problem in Gnome 2.20 and has already been discussed on other forums, but I could not find anything on this forum. Apparently, it's an issue specifically with nautilus. This Gnome bugzilla page makes interesting reading, and I wish I had found this and other forum threads before I had wasted a couple of hours fiddling around.

You can get round this by using another file manager such as gnome-commander, konqueror or thunar. Konqueror is not an elegant solution for gnome, thunar's OK-ish but gnome-commander is not in the portage tree, so I would rather avoid using Gnome 2.22 in Gentoo until this gets sorted. If it ever does - I'm not holding my breath.

So, assuming that Gnome 2.22 is going to be unmasked before very long, I want to mask it for myself in package.mask.

Question: would simply masking >=gnome-base/gnome-2.22.0 work? Or could I just mask the various 2.22 Nautilus packages and see if Nautilus 2.20 will work on Gnome 2.22? I rather suspect that wouldn't be a runner, but I'd be interested to hear any suggestions or comments.

Whatever, if nothing else this post can serve as a warning to other Gnome users who may not yet know about this appalling bug. So bad, in my view, that I'm playing with Xubuntu and Mandriva-KDE to see if I could live with either KDE or Xfce in Gentoo. I've never really warmed to KDE, but Xfce is a possibility.

[vonr]

Firstly, how "should Gentoo get this sorted"? It's clearly an upstream bug to which no agreed solution seems to be present as of yet. You could try the preliminary nautilus patch in the bug you linked; it looks simple enough.

Otherwise you'll need to mask all gnome-2.22 packages. For a list, look here. You could try mixing packages; I've never tried it, so I can't give you any advice on that. The problem lies in the new glib which many gnome-2.22 packages use.

[terracotta_shore]

Firstly, how "should Gentoo get this sorted"?

Did I say that? No, I didn't. When you use quotation marks you imply that you are quoting exactly what the first speaker said. Please do not misquote me or anyone else; it is bad netiquette. What I said was "..so I would rather avoid using Gnome 2.22 in Gentoo until this gets sorted" which is quite a different matter. I was not implying that Gentoo should get it sorted. I was quite aware that this is an upstream problem.

Anyway, putting aside your irritable response - for that is how it comes across - I thank you for taking the trouble to reply.

[mortagon]

You should mask Nautilus. gnome-base/gnome is a meta-package, so I do not think it will help preventing an update of Nautilus. In any case, Gnome 2.22 is still soft masked AFAIK.

EDIT: masking only Nautilus should be enough to prevent all out update of gnome components to 2.22, It is a fundamental part of Gnome so it should be a dependency for most gnome packages anyway.

[blueflame]

Let us know what approach you settled on for masking Gnome 2.22

This is an appalling "bug". I want to mask Gnome 2.22 until it gets fixed too.

[terracotta_shore]

mortagon, what an excellent thought about Nautilus being a fundamental dependency for the whole of Gnome - that never occurred to me. Thanks. I knew that gnome-base/gnome is a meta-package, but I didn't think it through, forgetting that all the many packages that make up Gnome are going to be in my world file anyway.

What I'll do is mask Nautilus 2.22 and when Gnome 2.22 gets unmasked see what the output of 'emerge -Dua world' is, and only go ahead if there don't seem to be any major problems. Whatever happens, I'll make a tar.gz archive of my whole root partition just before so that I can quickly restore it if everything goes pear-shaped. That's probably quicker than doing selective emerges back to earlier versions from a virtual console in an install with a broken desktop.

blueflame, I'll be watching this thread to see if there are any other ideas and I'll post my experience when Gnome 2.22 does eventually get unmasked. I'm glad you agree with me - it's good to know I'm not alone

[vonr]

Whoops, sorry about misreading your post; I mixed up some words in your sentence making it come out slightly different . With all the nonsensical bitching going on lately I just assumed the worst I guess...

I would still like to suggest trying the patch from the bug you linked to. It should get the job done:

Code: Select all

-	flags = G_FILE_COPY_NOFOLLOW_SYMLINKS;
+	flags = G_FILE_COPY_NOFOLLOW_SYMLINKS | G_FILE_COPY_ALL_METADATA;

Looks hackish and is likely not going to be implemented in exactly this way, but it should solve your problem for the time being.

[terracotta_shore]

vonr, no problems - no offence taken. I just wanted to distance myself from the silly bitching you refer to. I must admit though that I could have expressed myself better. The phrase "...until this gets sorted" is potentially ambiguous and is an example of what grammarians call the impersonal passive. About forty years ago one such grammarian advised against using the construction, saying that "it often amounts to a pusillanimous shrinking from responsibility". I confess to shrinking pusillanimously.

Thanks for the thought about the patch. To be honest, I still find Gentoo something of a challenge, and I haven't tried any patching yet, but I'll look into it.

I've had another thought about masking Gentoo 2.22, which I post for anyone else interested and/or for comments about how well or otherwise it will work. I had a look in the ebuild for the gnome-2.22.1 meta-package, and under RDEPEND there's a nice long list which one could copy and paste into package.mask with minimal editing. A representative section from the beginning:

>=dev-libs/glib-2.16.3
>=x11-libs/gtk+-2.12.9
>=dev-libs/atk-1.22.0
>=x11-libs/pango-1.20.1

I haven't yet compared the list in detail with the one vonr linked to, but the ebuild list does include glib which the other doesn't.

[blueflame]

Ok so Gnome 2.22 has been made stable now and because of this bug I longer trust the Gnome developers to have any sense. So has anyone successfully masked Gnome? Ive tried masking nautilus but emerge just complains:

Code: Select all

!!! All ebuilds that could satisfy ">=gnome-base/nautilus-2.21.2" have been masked.
!!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request:
- gnome-base/nautilus-2.22.5.1-r1 (masked by: package.mask, ~x86 keyword)
- gnome-base/nautilus-2.22.5.1 (masked by: package.mask)

For more information, see MASKED PACKAGES section in the emerge man page or 
refer to the Gentoo Handbook.
(dependency required by "gnome-extra/nautilus-open-terminal-0.9" [ebuild])

[EvaSDK]

if you would have read the fine sticky topic, you'd have read the this is long fixe and nautilus 2.22.5.1 and gvfs 0.2.5 which are the stable version do preserve timestamps.

[blueflame]

Ok, but it's suspicious that the upstream bug still seems open... Is that an oversight by the Gnome dev's or are there some issues still unresolved?

BTW, I still would like to know how to mask Gnome 2.22. In fact it would be nice if portage could be enhanced to allow this kind of thing so a meta package and it's dependencies can be masked.

[EvaSDK]

hum, it might be an oversight or simply that there is some related issue that isn't fixed yet, preserving xattrs maybe, I invite you to check nautilus & gvfs ChangeLog/NEWS file if you're still unsure.