Bug 26773 – Multiple PORTDIR_OVERLAY use not documented

• Status: RESOLVED INVALID
• Product: Portage Development

[Description Rob Cakebread (RETIRED) 2003-08-16 22:39:40 UTC]

You can specify multiple directories separated by : in PORTDIR_OVERLAY.
This needs to be documented in Portage Manual, Portage User Guide and in
/etc/make.conf

This feature was introduced into portage via bug# 10803 

This is important to document because people who write third-party portage
utilities need to know how to handle this new feature.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

[Comment 1 SpanKY 2003-08-28 09:42:27 UTC]

make.conf.5 has been updated, now make.conf should be ...

[Comment 2 Aaron Gyes 2003-10-24 20:40:42 UTC]

The documentation is wrong, while it can be space delimited, it's meant to
be colon delimited. I made the mistake of separating them with a space. A
third party ebuild thought it'd be a good idea to rm PORTDIR_OVERLAY/net-www/mozilla/files/somefile
in the end. Since I had two overlays separated by the space as documented.
it did a rm /usr/local/portage /home/floam/portage/net-www/mozilla/files/somefile.
Very bad :(

[Comment 3 Aaron Gyes 2003-10-24 20:41:25 UTC]

Sorry if I didn't make it obvious in the last post, but make.conf.5 states
it should be delimited with a space.

[Comment 4 SpanKY 2003-10-24 20:53:03 UTC]

root@vapier 0 portage # pwd
/usr/lib/portage
root@vapier 0 portage # grep split.*PORTDIR_OVERLAY * -R
pym/portage.py:         ec_overlays = suffix_array(string.split(settings["PORTDIR_OVERLAY"]),
"/eclass")
pym/portage.py:overlays = string.split(settings["PORTDIR_OVERLAY"])
root@vapier 0 portage # python   
Python 2.3.2 (#1, Oct  8 2003, 23:15:47) 
[GCC 3.3.1 20030916 (Gentoo Linux 3.3.1-r4, propolice)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import string
>>> PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/1 /2 /bucklemyshoe"
>>> for path in string.split(PORTDIR_OVERLAY): print path
... 
/1
/2
/bucklemyshoe
>>> PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/1:/2:/bucklemyshoe"
>>> for path in string.split(PORTDIR_OVERLAY): print path
... 
/1:/2:/bucklemyshoe
>>> 

looks like it is space delimited to me ...

[Comment 5 Rob Cakebread (RETIRED) 2003-10-24 22:50:03 UTC]

Ouch. What third party ebuild was this?

[Comment 6 Nicholas Jones (RETIRED) 2003-12-28 20:24:36 UTC]

It's documented and the third party ebuild is performing illegal
actions inside a portage tree.