hi, it will be quite useful to me, if emerge could patch the package on-the-fly. everlasting creating new alternative ebuilds for new each versions is tedious. it could work like this: emerge --patch "file.patch" package (or alternatively --patch-url "http://somewhere/file.patch" which after unziping sources (and applying patches specified by the appropriate ebuild) puts "file.patch" into "work" directory runs something like: cat file.patch |patch -p0 -E and after that normally runs the rest of the emerge process. have a nice day pavel
this has some heavy disadvantages: 1. totally intransparent 2. you can only emerge one package this way, as the patch will likely fail for all others 3. you have to specify the --patch argument every time you update the patched program Better ways to handle this situation are: a) Get the patch applied upstream. This is still the best solution in most cases, and after all this is how open source works. b) use post_src_unpack/pre_src_compile hooks through bashrc Both are already doable with current versions of portage, so I am going to close this as WORKSFORME.