hunky wrote:Am I completely missing your point?
I think you do. There is masking by keywords, and there is (hard-)masking by package.mask. We all had to unmask KDE-4.2 during its beta state by package.keywords files in order to get it, and it was more or less unstable but for most of the people, it worked. However whenever the ebuilds were hardmasked, that meant a) some ebuilds were still missing, b) sources were still missing, or c) some other reason which prevented that version of KDE to build no matter how hard you tried. Every time though you get some people having plainly unmasked just about everything to live on the absolute KDE edge, syncing in the midst of an ebuild upload and then wondering why that stuff won't work.
I know that at some point before the 4.2.0 release 4.2.96 got hardmasked again despite it being fully functional and only ~arch keyworded before, but I don't know why (perhaps to force 4.2.0).