It would fantastically handy in our production env. to be able to set something like "PORTAGE_CONFIG_DIR" in /etc/make.conf to override the default conf dir of /etc/portage/ Reproducible: Always
You aware how many tools will this break? I guess not...
Well I would assume that any place /etc/portage is hardwired can be fixed with a simple search and replace...
Well, if you want to break compatibility with lots of third-party stuff, you'd better have a good reason for that. I don't see any good reason here, esp. considering that you can symlink or bind-mount /etc/portage whereever you want if you cannot live with /etc/portage 'hardcoded'.
What 3rd party utilities go poking around in /etc/portage? I certainly don't use any that do.
E.g. gentoolkit, autounmask, gatt-svn and lots of others.
eix, portage-utils...
OK so there are 5 packages with this path hardcoded behavior that is utterly trivia to fix. We've already spent more time talking about why changing the behavior is impossible then doing it. I don't see how merely adding a new env to /etc/make.conf breaks theses packages anyways. They could switch to respecting it in there own sweet time. By the logic you guys are using here PORTDIR should have never been added as you could just bind mount over /usr/portage. But PORTDIR, PORTDIR_OVERLAY, and DISTDIR are incredibly useful to large installed sites as it allows the portage tree and binary packages to be mounted over NFS (100+ installs here). I don't see why it's so why it's so unnatural to be able to specify a path for the conf files as well. Currently I have use a silly script to rsync them...
PORTAGE_CONFIGROOT already exists.
man make.conf | grep CONFIGROOT
(In reply to comment #9) > man make.conf | grep CONFIGROOT Defining it in make.conf would lead to a Catch-22 situation since make.conf is supposed to be located at $PORTAGE_CONFIGROOT/etc/make.conf. So, it's documented in `man emerge`. I suppose you might be able to define it in /etc/env.d like is often done for other global environment variables.
awww, it moves the location of make.conf as well. That is very handy!
