The Portage Development Project works to provide a continuously expanding and developing tool for the management and installation of packages. The developers work on providing a coherent system that is as trouble free as possible (backwards compatible, automated, and simple). Bugs are tracked and fixed from the Gentoo bug tracker and developer-developer correspondence is maintained on the gentoo-portage-dev mailing list. Another communication channel is the #gentoo-portage IRC channel on the freenode network.
The goal of the Portage Development Project stands at providing a seamless integration of developer and user tools to aid the growth and maintenance of the Gentoo Portage Tree.
| Developer | Nickname | Role |
| Zac Medico | zmedico | Lead ( Release Coordinator ) |
| Ned Ludd | solar | Member |
| Mike Frysinger | vapier | Member ( Documentation ) |
| Mounir Lamouri | volkmar | Member |
| Members from subproject Gentoo Portage Tools | ||
| Paul Varner | fuzzyray | Lead ( gentoolkit ) |
| Christian Ruppert | idl0r | Member ( gentoolkit-dev ) |
| Harald van Dijk | truedfx | Member ( ufed ) |
All developers can be reached by e-mail using nickname@gentoo.org.
Please report all bugs you encounter on our bug tracking system. Before opening a new bug report please make sure that the bug has not already been reported by another user.
Important: Do not report bugs/requests about anything other than sys-apps/portage in the Portage Development product |
In your bug report please state clearly:
Please don't get too impatient if there is no immideate reaction on your bug, it can sometimes take a while before a developer has time to look at it (this also applies to non-Portage bug reports). Often we'll need additional information from you while trying to resolve a bug, please provide it as soon as you can, if we have to wait too long (over a month) we'll likely close the bug as RESOLVED:NEEDINFO, you can however reopen it when you posted the requested information.
Please do not reopen bugs unless you're in one of the following situations:
Be aware that we will still read comments on bug reports even if the report itself is closed, so you don't have to reopen it just to get our attention.
Every bug report deals with one specific problem, please respect that and don't talk about other not directly related bugs on a bug report.
Testing multiple Portage versions
Note: This section only applies to Portage 2.1.2 or later |
There are various reasons why you'd want to have multiple versions of portage available at the same time without having to install them as system default. Examples would be to check which versions are affected by a specific bug, to test new features before deploying a new version or have a svn checkout available for testing while keeping a stable release for normal operation.
As of Portage-2.1.2 one can have and use an arbitrary number of Portage installations parallel to each other by adjusting the two environment variables PATH and PYTHONPATH. For example if you have a checkout of the trunk branch at /checkouts/portage/trunk you'd set them like this:
Code Listing 4.1: settings to use portage trunk |
export PYTHONPATH="/checkouts/portage/trunk/pym:${PYTHONPATH}"
export PATH="/checkouts/portage/trunk/bin:${PATH}"
|
With those settings calling tools like emerge, repoman or ebuild will pickup the correct locations to import libraries. External tools like gentoolkit or porthole may or may not respect those settings though. Setting PATH isn't even necessary if you always call the commands by their full name (e.g. /checkouts/portage/trunk/bin/emerge instead of emerge).
If you want to submit a patch to sys-apps/portage or a related package, please make sure the patch follows these criteria:
If the patch is related to a specific bug report, please attach it there as text/plain. If it is not directly related to a bug report (to your knowledge) please send it to the gentoo-portage-dev mailing list and tag the subject with '[PATCH]'.
Note: Patches for packages NOT related to sys-apps/portage go on http://bugs.gentoo.org, please do not send them to the gentoo-portage-dev mailing list |
Access to Portage SVN repositories
The Portage sourcecode is maintained within a SVN repository on the Gentoo SVN server. This server is only accessible for Gentoo developers, it doesn't offer anonymous access. If you are a dev: The main repository is located at svn+ssh://cvs.gentoo.org/var/svnroot/portage/main, please note that it is subject to strict access controls, only people listed in the developers section on this page are able to commit to it.
Note: It is assumed you know how to work with Subversion. |
Note: The repository can be viewed over viewcvs |
The repository currently contains the following branches (incomplete list):
Note: The old CVS repository still exists, but is not updated anymore or used in any other way. |
The Portage project has the following subprojects:
| Project | Lead | Description |
| Portage Sandbox | The Portage Development Sandbox Project is devoted to maintaining and updating the portage sandbox library. | |
| Documentation | Mike Frysinger | Updating and Creating documentation for the tools of Portage. |
| Gentoo Portage Tools | Paul Varner | The Tools subproject deals with portage related tools that are not included in the core portage package. This covers maintaining ebuilds for external packages as well as developing and improving our own utilities and scripts. |
Resources offered by the Portage project are:
7. External Documentation Resources
Unless otherwise noted the following resources are maintained by the documentation project, but as they are the primary online documentation for portage we will list them here.