Introduction
Anyone who has used Gentoo Linux◳ before will be familiar with the Portage package management system◳ which is used to manage installed software and synchronise the installation repository. New users however may not be familiar with the basics of the Gentoo Linux build system. This section attempts to provide the basic information and references required to understand how the Hacking Networked Solutions patch-set for Gentoo Linux integrates with the official Gentoo Linux distribution.
The Gentoo build system and portage tree
The Gentoo build system is a collection of tightly integrated applications, written using the bash◳ and python◳ scripting languages, which is capable of building, installing, upgrading and removing any package described by an ebuild in the portage tree. To keep things as simple as possible an ebuild is in fact just a special kind of bash script which is run in an environment provided by the emerge application. Each ebuild describes how to perform the actions mentioned above on a particular version of a package.
The ebuild files for all versions of a particular package are grouped together in a two level deep directory hierarchy comprised of the class of the package and the name of the package, for example app-admin/syslog-ng which represents the syslog-ng package in the app-admin package class. A complete path to an actual ebuild would therefore look something like app-admin/syslog-ng/syslog-ng-3.1.1.ebuild and would correspond to version 3.1.1 of the syslog-ng package. The complete collection of all the ebuild files, and supporting files for all packages such as patches and manifests, is referred to as the portage tree.
The Hacking Networked Solutions patch-set for Gentoo Linux
The Hacking Networked Solutions patch-set for Gentoo Linux is a set of patches, organised into a directory hierarchy which mirrors the layout of the official portage tree, which modifies the official ebuild and supporting files of some packages to provide additional functionality or improved security.
