User:MGorny/Draft:Users' Guide to Repositories

This article is a work in progress; treat its contents with caution - MGorny (talk | contribs).

By default, Gentoo provides a huge ebuild repository called gentoo. It contains all the officially supported packages maintained by Gentoo developers and proxied maintainers. However, there are numerous additional official and unofficial repositories which can provide additional packages or more experimental flavors of regular Gentoo packages.

Finding additional ebuild repositories

Warning
Please note that all ebuild repositories get full ebuild permissions. In particular, they can override or otherwise interfere with system packages, and the ebuilds can perform any actions using root permissions. Use with caution.

Gentoo maintains an official listing of ebuild repositories at overlays.gentoo.org. The official list can be additionally browsed and accessed using app-portage/layman:

CODE Listing repositories using layman

$ layman -L

 * Fetching remote list...
 * Fetch Ok

 * abadonna-overlay          [Git       ] (https://gitlab.com/Abadonna/abadonna-overla...)
 * abendbrot                 [Git       ] (https://github.com/stefan-gr/abendbrot.git,...)
 * abnorm                    [Git       ] (git://github.com/faust/portage.git            )
 * activehome                [Git       ] (git://anongit.gentoo.org/user/activehome.gi...)
[...]

CODE Querying repository information using layman

$ layman -i abadonna-overlay

 * abadonna-overlay
 * 07:39, 15 June 2015 (UTC)07:39, 15 June 2015 (UTC)07:39, 15 June 2015 (UTC)~
 * Sources:
 *   1. https://gitlab.com/Abadonna/abadonna-overlay.git
 *   2. git@gitlab.com:Abadonna/abadonna-overlay.git
 * 
 * Contact : Abadonna <abadonna@abadonna.net>
 * Type    : Git; Priority: 50
 * Quality : experimental
 * 
 * Description:
 *   This personal repository contains ebuilds and fixes for packages that I'm interested in
 * 
 * Link:
 *   https://gitlab.com/Abadonna/abadonna-overlay
 *