On Thursday 20 December 2012 13:36:27 Alan McKinnon wrote: > > What program uses this "local" directory? It's not used directly by > > portage itself, though portage has an exclude for it in the default > > PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS setting > > (in /usr/share/portage/config/make.globals). > > It goes back a long time, and is basically a poor man's local overlay > without having to use layman. As I understand it, portage will treat > the directory like any other when looking for ebuilds and resolving > deps, but exclude it from a sync. Nope, he means /usr/portage/local, not /usr/local/portage. It is rarely (if ever, nowadays) present, as I understand, but you can find it mentioned in that config file. It may be just a legacy definition by now, looking at how only layman was mentioned with relation to it and even that one appears not to use it any more.
BTW, /usr/local/portage is hardly ""poor man's". Where are you going to store your local changes that are of interest only to you and not present in any other overlays? (like, you want to keep some old version of some package after it has been cleaned, or your personal mods). The location even accords to FHS, which is, apparently, a rarity :). George
