Avoiding the automated ooops effect

Hi,

I guess it's the time for all those proposals which have been ignored at 
Gentoo...?

I have read the email of Kevin Horn ("Package Priority") and that reminded me 
of some old ideas of mine... (though they don't have much in common with his 
ideas, their objective appears to be comparable).

Main wish: Be able to invoke automated update on a regular basis without the 
risk of a big oops.

Solution: 1. Make some installed ebuilds "protected" manually. E.g. glibc can 
only be updated if the user knows exactly what he is doing.

2. Make some scale on which base a user or a user's algorithm can decide if it 
prefers a particular ebuild or it doesn't. (Improving the primitive 
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS system...) There should be at least one scale like 
BROKEN...EXPERIMENTAL...SOLID, classifying the quality of an ebuild. Often, 
the original author and the ebuild author may dissent, so there should be 
scale: 1) evaluation by the original author, 2) evaluation by the ebuild's 
author, if necessary, split into several platforms/architectures.

3. There should be a primitve system to classify the importance of an ebuild, 
either on the LATERAL...INTEGRAL and on the UNKNOWN...XXPOPULAR scale. (These 
values can be generated out of statistics sources automatically...)

With some programming knowledge, or some easily modifyable formulars, every 
user could be able to do a regular update of his system, provided the desired 
stability class(es).

Only a few ideas... ,)

Kind regards
k.j.