Currently PMS allows only paths in the "parent" file for profile. This could be a relative one (which is used between profiles in ::gentoo as an example) or absolute one (for example for user configured profiles). But this makes it hard for overlays to create a profile which depends on another overlay's profile as parent. In portage (look at `man 5 portage`), you can use the <repo>:<path> syntax: > If layout.conf is new enough, you can also use the <repo>:<path> syntax. > The <repo> is the same string as is stored in the repo_name file (or omitted > to refer to the current repo), and <path> is a subdir starting at profiles/. Some things mentioned by @ulm in IRC channel: > would <repo> be allowed to have any value? or only master repositories of > the current repo? I believe we can limit this when used for profiles of repositories, as this is a good idea, as we need to declare the dependency of the repo for this profile to even work. But for user profiles (/etc/portage/make.profile used as a directory with a parent file, not as a symlink to a profile in a repo) I think we allow any repo name that is defined in /etc/portage/repos.conf. For PMS I don't know if the above text for user profiles is needed, but I added my thoughts. > how do we distinguish file name foo:bar from repo:profile? > restricting profile names to chars [A-Za-z0-9+_.-] would avoid the problem > (and hopefully won't restrict anything in practice) While I think restricting any directory name or path name to use normal chars (I think : is quite problematic, for example used for $PATH separation), we can also do it another way: If : appears in path, it is always a <repo>:, and for usage with a path containing :, just declare it in syntax of <repo>:<path> (AKA 2 appearances of : in the line). Any normal path can be defined using <repo>:<path> so this is acceptable (for such a rare possible situation).
