Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo as a development platform

[Jason Cooper <gentoo@lakedaemon.net>]

Daniel Drake (dsd@gentoo.org) scribbled:
> Quite often, I use Gentoo's from-source nature to my advantage when developing
> or testing software packages.
> 
> Gentoo is fairly well oriented for this kind of environment, but it's not
> brilliant. As an example, foo-3.2.1 (the latest version) is installed on my
> system, but more recently, they fixed a critical bug in the upstream CVS tree
> which I'd like to test the fix for. It's not dead simple for me to do this - I
> want to use the CVS sources with the ebuild already in portage. I have to use
> "ebuild foo-3.2.1.ebuild unpack" to extract the sources, then manually replace
> them with my CVS checkout. Or checkout CVS, make a new tarball, call it
> foo-3.2.1.tar.bz2, redigest and remerge the ebuild. Or I could create a
> foo-cvs ebuild and go to the trouble of making it mirror the contents of
> foo-3.2.1.ebuild exactly.
> 
> It's great that its *possible* right now thanks to portage and co, but I'm
> interested in ways of making this easier. Before I give this more thought, I'd
> be interested to know if anyone has already got any scripts or tips :)

What about something akin to gcc?  ie. you create a
/usr/local/portage/foo-ness/foo/foo-cvs.ebuild, then adapt gcc-config to
select which installed package to use, foo-1.2.3 or foo-cvs?  Would
definitely be some work, but would be a good long-term, easily
maintainable solution.  'foo-config cvs' would use the last cvs build
you did, then 'foo-config 1.2.3' would drop you back to regular.

hth,

Cooper.
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