poudriere merging multiple ports trees

[Russell L. Carter]

On 1/24/21 2:23 PM, Guido Falsi wrote:
> On 24/01/21 20:35, Russell L. Carter wrote:
>> Greetings, I am completely ignorant here and am looking for up to 
>> date advice on how to get poudriere to build and make available
>> package sets from multiple ports trees.  I see there is a port
>> "portshaker" that seems to do much of what I want.
>> 
>> I can think of possible alternatives:
>> 
>> I can reasonably expect to have my local ports not conflict with
>> already existing ports (could be a common prefix in the name).
>> Since I'm using git, I should be able to maintain my own branch
>> which layers my own ports over upstream and git pull, merge from
>> upstream.
>> 
>> or
>> 
>> I can duplicate the structure and metadata of the existing ports
>> tree and add my own ports and leaves in the tree. Still have to
>> maintain unique names.  This seems to be what portshaker does?  I
>> am guessing that gets me a single package repo.
>> 
>> or
>> 
>> Have two ports trees and generate two package repos, but then
>> dependencies would be redundantly built, I guess.
>> 
>> What do the professionals do here?
> 
> I've been using portshaker for this (ports-mgmt/portshaker) for this
> for a long time.
> 
> But when the ports tree will be migrated to git in the near future I
>  plan to stop using portshakern and use a git repository forked from
> the main one (and syncronized to it) with feature branches for any
> change and some "build" branches which I checkout in poudriere and to
> which I merge the feature branches as needed.
> 
> Git allows for such a workflow and that should also be quite less
> error prone.
> 
> BTW I noticed poudriere performs shallow clones for git repos, so it
>  should not use up a lot of disk space.
> 

Yes, it seems obvious to me to use git for maintaining
the feature branches containing my ports, and as you point out
it makes it easy to maintain multiple feature branches
containing different contents.  Keeping the names disjoint will
prevent messy conflicts.  I am by no means a git expert and
I already do this all the time for other projects.


Many thanks,
Russell