EXTRA_ECONF. I believe is a very useful arguement but it is not mentioned anywhere in the Portage User Guide or Portage Manual. The arguement allows us(normal users who want to configure packages such as apache, php, mysql...etc) to configure packages to great degree. My understanding is that the arguement saves time and trouble of not having to modify the ebuilds but allows us to add options to gnu configure(nomrally done through "./configure"). This argument is not well known. I asked in various gentoo chatrooms on efnet and freenode , during the 4th day of my search process i found out that the argument does exist thanks to a gentoo devoloper. During these 4 days i was told by several channel ops that the only way to do this was through modifying ebuilds or compiling the packages manually. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
I think it should be added to the gentoo portage user guide as well. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/portage-user.xml
it's mentioned in ebuild(5) the reason it's not mentioned in users guides is because not every package uses it ... the only real consitent way of always passing custom options to configure is by editing the ebuild ... in other words, the question 'how do i do my own configure' in the FAQ is sufficient
