I believe it would be a good enhancement for the kernel sources to be directly unpacked and patched in /usr/src if they don't trash over another directory already there. All kernel versions are slotted and take up their own directory, it takes a lot of time to copy over the sources over after extracting them. It would almost halve the time it takes to emerge the kernel sources and would save much disk writes on SSD systems and greatly increase emerge speeds on older systems of these packages. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. emerge *-sources 2. 3.
Interesting point, but might be difficult to accomplish in ebuild/image strucktures.
(In reply to comment #1) > Interesting point, but might be difficult to accomplish in ebuild/image > strucktures. > Is it possible in ebuilds to do patching during the installation section? If not, this would probably only be workable for vanilla-sources. Unless prepatched tgz's were hosted for kernel images, as well. Patching during installation, or doing the installation during the "compiling" section, might solve this as well.
This will not work in portage. There are many technical reasons this can't be done. The image directory is needed for things such as INSTALL_MASK and some FEATURES. Also, portage needs the image directory to track who owns what files.