overlays

[Łukasz Wąsikowski]

W dniu 2011-09-16 08:24, Klaus T. Aehlig pisze:

> Now I'm really curios what magic device gentoo has. Once thing I
> most appreciate about FreeBSD is how flexible it is in precisely
> this manner.

[...]

> Could you please elaborate, which additional features gentoo's overlay
> system brings on top of that?

Simplicity. I'm not familiar with FreeBSD's way of doing overlays, quick
googling and quick testing may be not enough to say anything in that
matter, so I'll just describe how I do it in Gentoo.

I've got ca. 70 Gentoo servers and I want my own portage overlay. So
I've set up svn server with my ports. Each of 70 servers has a script in
/etc/portage/postsync.d which retrives my ports from svn server during
the synchronization of portage tree. Each server have a line in
/etc/make.conf: PORTDIR_OVERLAY=/some/local/directory

Let's say I've wrote a new ebuild for a new category, for example:
my-category/my-port/my-port-1.0.ebuild. Now I have to do prepare it for
"shipping", so:

cd my-category/my-port && ebuild my-port-1.0.ebuild digest && svn ci

That's all, after next portage update (via emerge --sync) I'll end with
up-to-date official portage tree and up-to-date my overlay. Ports from
my overlay will work with emerge out of the box (checking for new USE
flags, checking if port needs updating, etc.)

Summarize:

Enable overlay:
- one simple script in postsync.d
- one line in make.conf

Prepare port for tree:
- one command to make ebuild
- one command to commit it to svn

Sync and install/update:
- one command to update portage tree on each server
- one command to install/update port(s)

How would it look like on FreeBSD?

-- 
best regards
Lukasz Wasikowski