Re: [gentoo-alt] Package failures

[François Bissey]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 21:55:09 William Morris wrote:
> Hi Benda, Fabian
>
> Thanks for the help.  I had another situation today after doing a sync and
> trying to update (with emerge --update --deep --with-bdeps=y --newuse
> world). The merge failed on the first of 48 (libpng).  It turned out that
> it was quite easy to fix and I did so by changing the makefile in the
> working directory: make and then make install worked.  However, that is
> clearly not enough and emerge --resume just continued from the beginning.
> Modifying the tarball with my fix also failed as the ebuild re-downloaded a
> new tarball. As you can see I'm grasping...
>
> So what is the correct way to approach this sort of failure?  Sure I should
> report a bug (I created bug report which turned out to be a duplicate of bug
> 465010), but after doing that, I don't want to wait for resolution if I
> have a solution.  But equally, I don't necessarily want to create a patch
> and modify the ebuild to apply it.  Is there a shortcut to be able to
> continue?  I have done a emerge --skipfirst to let the merge continue, but
> that will still leave some packages un-merged.
>
> I guess this is where overlays come into play, but to be honest,
> http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Overlay doesn't get me far (maybe I'm too dense
> to follow it, but it doesn't seem to say how I actually create the overlay:
> what do I create?). layman seems no use in this case...
>
> Sorry to bug you; ignore if busy, but any pointers would be gratefully
> received
> :-)

This link may be more useful:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-827407-start-0.html
There are some debatable points (usage of root) about it but it should be 
enough to get you started with your own overlay.

Francois