Re: [gentoo-dev] overlay usage and maintainence [was: DistroWatch and Gentoo packages: status quo and future]

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Sun, 13 Sep 2009 22:17:19 +0200
Sebastian Pipping <webmaster@××××××××.org> wrote:
> Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > Not quite. If both an overlay and the main tree provide foo-1.2,
> > masking foo-1.2::overlay in Portage would end up masking every
> > foo-1.2.
>
> Why?

Because an overlay model has only a single foo-1.2. Think of it like
stacks of paper. You've got your main repository:

  ::gentoo    foo-1.1 foo-1.2 foo-1.3

and on top of that you put your overlay:

  ::extras          foo-1.2         foo-1.4
  ::gentoo  foo-1.1 foo-1.2 foo-1.3

and then looking down from the top, all an overlay model package
manager sees is the foo-1.2 from the overlay. There's no
foo-1.2::gentoo and foo-1.2::extras, there's just a single foo-1.2
that's made from (gentoo + extras).

There's a different way of looking at it that focuses more on the
repository level view at [1].

[1]: http://ciaranm.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/distributed-distribution-development-and-why-git-and-or-funtoo-is-not-it/

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh