Re: [gentoo-user] how to support a package going out of tree

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 9:01 AM, Neil Bothwick <neil@××××××××××.uk> wrote:
> On Fri, 26 Jan 2018 12:13:32 +0100, Raffaele Belardi wrote:
>
>> One of my son's favourite games (hedgewars) is going out of tree due to
>> dependency on deprecated QT4.
>>
>> I already have a local overlay with a modified hedgewars ebuild which
>> adds support for a non-standard USE flag but I suppose this will not be
>> sufficient to continue using/building the game. Once the dependencies
>> will go out of tree also there will be little chance to rebuild the
>> game if necessary, right?.
>
> Right, so copy the dependencies to your overlay too. Portage will warn
> you when they are slated for removal.
>

Or use an overlay that already contains them.  I haven't paid much
attention to whether somebody is maintaining a qt4 sunset overlay.

Keep in mind that qt4 is deprecated for a reason.  This will
definitely be a steadily uphill battle, and you might run into issues
you'll have to deal with yourself.

In addition to the ebuilds you might need to check to see if they use
any eclasses (which seems likely for anything like qt).  Also check
for any Gentoo-hosted patches that might go away - you'd need to host
them yourself and edit SRC_URI, or just stick them in files/.  You
should probably also save a copy of all the distfiles somewhere in
case a URL dies, as Gentoo won't be mirroring them for you.  If
upstream completely stops distributing a file you might be stuck if
you didn't save a copy.

-- 
Rich