Bug 333599 – sys-apps/portage enhancement: Overlays management

• Product: Portage Development
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Vasilis Lourdas 2010-08-20 10:01:08 UTC]

I don't know if this is the right place to submit a proposal for portage, but let me try it out.

Currently, portage does not manage overlays. What I mean is that when a package exists inside the official tree and an overlay that the user added with layman, it installs the latest available version from the overlay (provided that this version is newer that the one inside the tree). That's ok, but what happens when there's another overlay that also contains the same package? I have bumped upon the case when I wanted a specific version from a specific overlay, but portage would choose a higher version or a version from another overlay.

So, it would be nice for portage to give the user the ability to prioritize the overlays (and the packages in them). Consider this example:

tree      contains foo-1.23 (~)
overlay1  contains foo-1.23 (~) with additional patches
overlay2  contains foo-1.23 (~) with another set of patches and different dependencies

I want to install foo-1.23 from overlay1. There's must be some way to mask the other versions or to make overlay1 to take precedence from the tree and overlay2. Or simply I want to install the official foo-1.23 from the tree and not mess with "experimental" ebuilds from the other overlays (to answer your "why did you add these two in the first place?" question, it's because overlay1 and overlay2 have ebuilds that are not in the tree, or have ebuilds with newer versions than the tree).

Thanks.

[Comment 1 Zac Medico 2010-08-20 12:22:29 UTC]

There was a SOC project working on multi-repo support this summer:

http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/portage-multirepo.git

[Comment 2 Zac Medico 2010-10-01 16:03:51 UTC]

This is getting closer now that the 'reposyntax' patches give support for parsing sync URI from /etc/portage/repos.conf:

http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/portage.git;a=commit;h=5309ef42b2e82160705bd0ffead1aed40d61944c

[Comment 3 Vasilis Lourdas 2011-08-06 21:15:54 UTC]

Is there any progress regarding this request?

[Comment 4 Sebastian Luther (few) 2011-08-06 21:26:23 UTC]

I'd say this bug can be closed as fixed. You can now append ::repo_name to atoms in all config files and on the command line.

[Comment 5 Zac Medico 2011-08-06 23:53:36 UTC]

If you prefer a certain repo for a certain package, then you should put a repo atom in your world file like this:

   emerge --noreplace foo-1.23::overlay1

It's supported since portage-2.1.10.3:

http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/portage.git;a=commit;h=0f799b2a045dfa74ba011123bf5ea6186f44941d