Contributing to portage

DarwinianCoeus · Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004 5:00 pm Post subject: Contributing to portage

I just ran across a nifty resource for animated lilo boot screens, and a utility called gfxboot for creating your own animated boot screens. I checked to see if it was in portage, and upon finding it wasn't, decided it was time to start giving back to the community :-D

So where do I start?

Kihaji · Apprentice Joined: 12 Sep 2002 Posts: 230

Right here:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/ebuild-submit.xml

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

I think it would be more apropriate to start with the Docs on how to create an ebuild. They can be found on the Docs link at www.gentoo.org.
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Quis separabit? Quo animo?

ecatmur · Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004 6:45 pm Post subject:

The page pjp was referring to: http://www.gentoo.org./doc/en/gentoo-howto.xml

You *need* to read the whole thing, but the most important is to put your new ebuild in /usr/local/portage (the overlay), and to test, test and test again using ebuild.

A useful resource is /usr/portage/skel.* which are 'skeleton' ebuild, Changelog and metadata.xml files. However in some cases you may prefer to base your ebuild on an existing build - that's fine.

Also useful is the ebuild (5) manpage for involved documentation on the structure and creation of ebuild files. (man 5 ebuild). If stuff doesn't do what you expect, you may find it helpful to browse /usr/sbin/ebuild.sh, which contains the definitions of functions like ewarn and use.

Have fun! Creating ebuilds is one of the most rewarding ways to be part of Gentoo.

And... uh... you may like to look at this: http://dev.gentoo.org/~seemant/overlay/sys-boot/gfxboot/
Just 'cos it's not in Portage doesn't mean an ebuild doesn't exist - it's often useful to go out and search for "packagename ebuild" on Google.