2.6 Custom Overlays
Overview
I've put some info here on creating your own custom overlays
Overlay Setup
Userpriv feature
One of the security features enabled by default within portage / emerge, is to always run commands such as emerge or ebuild as the portage user. If your working on an overlay and it's in a place portage can't access, this can cause a problem.
One work around to this (although this makes the system a little less secure) is to just turn off the userpriv feature.
nano -w /etc/portage/make.conf
FEATURES="-userpriv"
To see which features are already enabled
emerge --info | grep ^FEATURES=
Custom Overlays
If you want to setup your own overlay on github, one useful tool is
layman-overlay-maker
To generate the xml for layman. However you'll need layman 2.2.0 or later to use it
emerge --autounmask-write =app-portage/layman-2.3.0
I'd recommend going back to the default layman version after using layman-overlay-maker. I had problems with 2.3.0
Ebuild Setup
Creating the Digest
The first step is to create a digest / Manifest file for the ebuild, this just acts as a verification when downloading the source for the emerge that the correct source files have been downloaded
ebuild <filename>.ebuild digest
The end result should be changes or the addition of a Manifest file also the sources for the ebuild will be downloaded into /usr/portage/distfiles/ This needs to be done whenever the ebuild file is changed, before it can be used for emerge
Unpack the Sources
The next stage is to unpack / uncompress the sources
ebuild <filename>.ebuild unpack