[gentoo-dev] Patch for mixing stable/unstable

[Jens Hamacher]

Hello,

I am relative new to using gentoo.
Coming from debian, I wanted a mixture of testing/unstable, since nobody needs the newest version of every package on his system.
Gentoo gave my troubles when I tried to install two packages from my nvidia graphic card which weren't in stable.
I read there were plans for programming "sticky variables", but I think this is much more complicated then reincluding unstable packages only.

So after looking at the sources of portage 2.0.47-r7  I made this small patch:

- a line in /etc/make.conf with the packages to install "unstable":
UNSTABLE_PKGS="media-video/nvidia-kernel media-video/nvidia-glx"

-a few lines to reinclude the chosen packages:
/usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/portage.py, line 3395:
                        cpv=cpv_getkey(mycpv)
                        if cpv in unstable_include:
                                match=1

/usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/portage.py, last line:
unstable_include=settings["UNSTABLE_PKGS"].split()

This seems to work quite good, enabling "update world" and "search" on the newest packages.
One does have to consider the depending packages, if the unstable package requires other unstable packages. But this should be less of a problem with source-based packages than in debian.
And it doesn't check after the architecture at all, so it probably only works for x86 systems. I'll try it with a hash next.

I hope this is a help for some people.

Greetings, 
Jens Hamacher

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