Re: [gentoo-user] Building packages in different prefix without rebuilding system packages

[Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org>]

On 5/14/20 7:55 AM, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Thu, 14 May 2020 18:17:06 +0800, Pengcheng Xu wrote:
> 
>> That seems interesting.  Do we need to include Portage install prefix
>> (/var/tmp/portage/category/package/..., the image path prefix before
>> actually merging with /)?
>>
>> Regards,
> 
> No, just the --prefix=/home/blah/ that you want added to the ./configure
> invocation.
> 

This is a good way to install packages that you've built by hand into
(say) your home directory, but it will cause problems if you try to
trick portage into doing it. The big problem is that no other packages
are going to know where to find the thing you just installed. Everything
else in the Gentoo repository is designed to use standard values of
PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, the compiler's include dir, PKG_CONFIG_PATH, etc.
If you take one program and put it somewhere non-standard, then every
package depending on it is going to break.

If you install an *additional* copy (built by hand) in your home
directory, that's fine -- the system copy will still be in the right
place -- you just don't want to hide the system copy where nobody can
find it.