Re: [gentoo-server] installing outside of portage

[Martin Hajduch]

>
> So, my question is, what are my risks here? Does this only mean that
> future "emerge world"s will leave bind behind?

yes, portage does not know that you have bind installed
unless ... have you unmerged gentoo's installation it before manual 
install ?
if not, portage will update those files which are part of portage's bind
what it will do when you update bind depends on how much your manual 
installation overlap with portage's installation

> Is there some other risk that I don't know about? If I just emerge
> bind again, will it hose the settings this guy did for us? (I would
> assume so.)

again, depends on whether you use the same location of configuration 
files or not
in general, if the configuration is under /etc; this is included in 
CONFIG_PROTECT by default, what means that the files are not overwritten
update will copy new (updated) files to these directories under new 
names and will ask you to use etc-update to merge the changes

> Just how bad is it to have software (esp. important stuff like our
> name server) installed from outside the tree?

i run servers with custom applications
obviously, these applications are not from portage ;-); and it is the 
most important part of the server
so i don't see anything bad on it

in your case, it is just waste of your time because (if you want to have 
the same security as with portage) you should always check for new bind 
versions/security patches
and manually update bind whenever security patch is available
portage can do this for you

i would suggest you to backup your current configuration, emerge bind; 
use qpkg -l bind -> this will show you which files are part of gentoo's 
bind installation and where they are located
it should be reasonably easy to replace them with your configuration 
files, you may only need to replace file name references but that should 
do it

you need to emerge gentoolkit in order to get qpkg tool

regards,
martin