Mark's Blog

The nice thing about Gentoo is that you can extend its port-like “portage” system by third-party trees. They are called ‘overlays‘ to the official main tree. I have started mine about four years ago after having used Gentoo for more than three years, then. A lot has changed, but something is still missing – and that’s my OSSDL overlay meant for.

The overlay has ebuilds for the latest versions of Nginx – to be found as www-servers/nginx – with a modules system similar to that of Apache. PHP-fpm, for which I keep the patches up to date; MonetDB as non-monolithic ebuild so you can install parts of it like with the original installer (plus the Portage goodies, of course). Regularly, latest MySQL versions and I hope, MariaDB releases in the near future.

PECL-IDN for punycode domain name support in PHP, in case you want something like Openmailadmin – which is there, too. I don’t want to bother you about Cyrus-IMAPd (as non-bdb version with fastmail.fm patches, if you want it), latest GEOS and the such. But you might take a look into the sys-meta category by which you could replicate a system by four commands or less.

The overlay is maintained primarily by me and about three other specialists, informaticians mostly. But if you want to share ideas and code, you’re welcome to join in.

You can obtain the OSSDL Gentoo overlay by GIT from http://git.ossdl.de/:

mkdir -p /usr/local/overlays
cd /usr/local/overlays
git clone http://git.ossdl.de/r/ossdl-overlay.git ossdl
test -f /etc/portage/make.conf \
&& nano /etc/portage/make.conf \
|| nano /etc/make.conf

Announce the new overlay to Portage by putting that line into your make.conf:

PORTDIR_OVERLAY=" \
    /usr/local/overlays/ossdl-overlay \
# ...
    "

For the sake of completeness and search engines, here is the list of ebuilds as of today without version numbers:

(obtained by tree -dif -L 2 | cut -b 3- | grep '/' | sort -u)

Changelogs and authors’ emails can be obtained from history maintained by GIT.

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Tags: ebuild, Gentoo, GNU/Linux, ossdl overlay, portage