how I distribute my code on my network with portage (& maintain distributability for outsiders)

(If you want to sync from my overlay, use this gensync config )

after years of using gentoo/portage, i have formulated ebuilds for my network of computers:

I don't distribute (between my hosts) tarballs, but the ebuilds copy from a central repository: "fetch" does nothing, "unpack" does. In this way, i don't have to package all the time, make new ebuild versions (digests).

I have been using this approach for sawfish: it has a dual functionality: for my local hosts, it copies (from my development tree), for (your) remote hosts it gets the versioned tarball.

I simply emerge on any box i want, and get the snapshot of the day.

I have written 2 eclasses

http://www.ruska.it/comp/gentoo/portage/eclass/maruska.eclass http://www.ruska.it/comp/gentoo/portage/eclass/maruska-gauche.eclass

how I download source packages:

I ssh into the NFS server w/ distfiles directory, and have it download:. For this I had to generate a special SSH key. And, since portage firstly sees that the file is absent, then invokes a download on the remote host, i have to flush the NFS (attribute) cache. I did it by mounting with "noac" option.