On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 5:34 PM, Rich Freeman <ri...@gentoo.org> wrote: > We're starting to drift off topic here, but I've always felt that this > is something that could be improved on. I'm not saying that any of > this should just be thrown together, but some of the following might > be useful: > > 1. Overlay dependencies (depends on a particular package from a > particular overlay).
In EAPI 5-progress, there's support for atom::repo deps. > 2. Overlay package.* (accept one version of one package from a > particular overlay, mask all packages in an overlay that aren't > explicitly unmasked, don't apply package.(un)mask from one overlay to > packages in another unless the mask references that overlay > specifically, etc). These things are all supported by portage, through use of atom::repo in /etc/portage/package.* (or profile with EAPI 5-progress) and repo-level configurations in $repo/profiles/package.* (which only apply to packages from that repo). > 3. Repository priority (paludis handles this fairly well I think) - > where you can control which overlays override which other ones. Portage also supports priority setting in /etc/portage/repos.conf. > I've never really liked the all-or-nothing design of overlays as they > currently stand. These days, they should be much more flexible than they have been in the past. > Even simply prioritizing them is a pretty crude > approach. It makes them fairly useless for general-purpose > distribution of packages. > > Rich >
