Hybrid gentoo/hand-crafted system? Ideas?

[samureye]

Hey there..

Does anyone know of an option I might be able to set/define in the /etc/make.conf that will allow me to do the following: -

Just say I wanted to install less-376 into /usr/local/packages/less-376
and have the 'bin' and 'man' directories under it.

I would then like to symlink the files in 'bin' and 'man' into the appropriate directories.

This will allow me to have all installed packages in /usr/local/packages to which I could easily remove/disable/upgrade/etc and make maintaining different package versions even easier.

At the moment, on my other non-gentoo box, I build everything manually and install packages in /usr/local/packages but find this difficult when trying to keep up to date with latest packages (where I find gentoo excellent).

So, I guess, what I'm after is a combination of a gentoo system with a hand-crafted system.

Anyone have any ideas/flames?

[Naan Yaar]

http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/

may help.

[n0n]

Another package that does the same thing as GNU Stow is called Encap, available at http://www.encap.org/. You install packages into /usr/local/encap/package-1.0.0 (or whatever), run "epkg -i package", and it makes the symlinks for you. "epkg -r package" will remove it. If package version 1.1.0 comes out, just install into /usr/local/encap/package-1.1.0, then "epkg -i package" and it'll deal with the upgrade for you. Very very cool.

Evidentally it's functionally identical to GNU Stow, but I've never used Stow myself, so I can't vouch for it. On my Debian system, though, I've got over 190 packages installed using Encap. IMO, it's the best way to keep track of self-installed software that there is.

Update: Oh, right . . . There's more to it than just the symlink thing - Encap kind of defines its own package format (in competition with Debian and RPM, etc), but I've never used that bit. So on the homepage you'll probably see stuff about their package format, but feel free to just ignore it and just worry about the symlinking.

[samureye]

Thanks for the replies guys

Just wondering if there would be any way to integrate either of these utilities into gentoo?

So, instead of gentoo selecting the installation location, could it be chosen based on the default packages directory and the package name

'/usr/local/packages' and 'less-376' for example?

[Naan Yaar]

I cannot see any easy way of doing this (others might ). I suspect if you were going to write wrappers in order to integrate into ebuild, it may be as easy/hard to build an ebuild for the package itself.

If you keep it in /usr/local in separate directories, as you would with encap or stow, it is typically not that much of a maintenance headache.

[mvo]

I'm using checkinstall to create slackware *.tgz packages, and the slackware package tools to manage them - works fine. You can also use it to create RPM's - the RPM package manager is included in gentoo.

[chadh]

Gentoo/Portage does not support installing packages in locations other than where the ebuild puts them by default. It was probably a mistake, but the policy has always been to hardcode the --prefix in the ebuilds. New ebuilds are getting away from this and using "econf" instead of configure --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man --... Eventually we may be able to support installing packages to separate subdirectories.
_________________
Chad

[Naan Yaar]

Not sure why one would need this with emerge/ebuild itself? It already maintains a manifest of installed files in /var/db... to make emerge clean/unmerge, etc., work correctly.

I guess there is a little less clutter with separate directories