[gentoo-dev] prefix overide portage

[Matt Doughty <wyndigo@zad.att.ne.jp>]

Hi,
I hate to start by complaining or critisizing what I consider a
wonderful project.  I'm basically a NetBSD user who is looking
for functionality(hardware 3d support) that linux has, and 
NetBSD is lacking. I was working through the install, and ran
into a couple oddities/annoyances.  I noticed that alot of
packages in portage statically set the install prefix.  I find
this to be very undesirable behavior, and was wondering if
this is temporary or has noone complained about this rather
rigid structure? From my perspective a system should be divided 
in this manner:

base system (kernel, and userland): 	--prefix=/, and --prefix=/usr
package system installed pkgs:     	--prefix=/usr/pkg
X system:			 	--prefix=/usr/X11R6

this leaves /usr/local, and /opt for hand built packages. In NetBSD
the base system is completely seperate from the package system, and
the package system, and X prefixes can be overridden by the 
enviroment variables LOCALBASE, and X11BASE respectively. I love 
the overall design of the system, and clean nature of the /etc
directory.  I would be happy to help make the needed changes to
allow for this increased flexibility.

--Matt