There has got to be some way to get entropy to understand that some package is just none of its business to mess with, and should even be a way for it to pretend that the package is installed so that things that depend on it can still install (albeit possibly broken install) things that depend on it.
I use portage for a couple of packages. One or two of those do exist in entropy. I am well aware of the dangers and possibilities of things getting broken.
Anyway there are reasons why I use portage for those packages so I put them in entropy package.mask to get entropy to leave them alone. Sadly... as I knew would happen, all this did was to remind me later which packages I may need to emerge (that's good), but it also prevented entropy from doing world updates because there is no best effort option for an "equo world".
I realize that this functionality can horribly break lots of dependancies... yada yada.. no seriously... I know. Package.provided is probably safer than a --force option of some kind to equo becasue it's less obvious how to use it, so noobs won't be too tempted to just "force" it, but it's less safe in that it allows reverse depends to still be installed, so both options would be good. One far from redeeming(can be don other ways) good thing about entropy abusing the world file by placing every single installed package in it, is that at least equo would still do it's best to install absolutely everything else... including packages that are only needed for the "provided" package. Then the re-emerges could deviate from entropy as minimially as possible to meet it's depends at least if one is careful about the emerge options.
Am I missing an option somewhere?