Re: [gentoo-dev] about modifying an ebuild in local overlay and $FILESDIR

[Mike Gilbert <floppym@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 4:03 PM, Christian Bricart <christian@bricart.de> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> from time to time, I need to make (and maintain) modifications to an
> ebuild from the main tree in my local overlay.
> So basically, I create the directory structure from
> /usr/portage/<category>/<package>/ under
> /usr/local/portage/<category>/<package>/, copy over the ebuild and do my
> modifications in the ebuild.
> So far how an overlay works ;-)
>
> But if there are references to patches, init-scripts, conf-files, etc
> from $FILESDIR w/i the original ebuild, one also needs to copy those
> into /usr/local/portage/../../files/ ..
>
> Is it possible to "overlay" such files used in epatch(), newins(),
> newconfd(), newinitd(), etc too..?
>
> so i.e:
> FILESDIR = "${repository_location}/${CATEGORY}/${PN}/files"
> should support a fallback to:
> FILESDIR = "${PORTDIR}/${CATEGORY}/${PN}/files"
> if not found...
> (or actually to the defined $master from the repo used)

No, this is not possible. It might be possible to implement in
portage, but I don't think it's a very good/workable idea.

As a workaround, you could symlink individual files, or even the
entire files directory.