[gentoo-user] Prebuilt packages

[Peter Humphrey <peter@prh.myzen.co.uk>]

Greetings,

I was delighted to see Gentoo's venture into prebuilt packages, having two 
small machines here. However, experience has rubbed some of the shine off.

Any time I update the system, if there's no package with the right USE flags, 
or even no package at all, I've built from source in the traditional way. 
Later, on running 'eclean-pkg --deep --package-names', I get a load of 
invalid-package warnings. I just assumed that was harmless.

More serious, I'm sure, is the mess I'm getting into with 'emerge -k' and/or 
'emerge -K'. It became so bad that I tried reinstalling from scratch today. I 
couldn't make it work at all - at one stage I was told to emerge @preserved-
rebuild, whereupon it insisted on installing the nouveau drivers. 
Preposterous.

Can portage not operate a mixed prebuilt and home-grown system?

-- 
Regards,
Peter.