No, here are no Gentoo binaries, you haven't really expected one,
have you? ;)

Rather you can find here ebuilds to compile the latest bleeding edge
development versions. By default these ebuild(s) compile the latest
version from CVS HEAD, but by setting the use flag "dev" it uses sources
from your local system. The latter is very handy if you want to put your
hands on the source code of the version that's going to be emerged. You
have to adjust the variable MY_LOCAL_SOURCES at the beginning of the ebuild
to the path of your local source files if you want to use your own, local
development source files.

You don't know how to establish a custom ebuild on your system? Here's how
it goes:

  * Activate "portage overlay" in /etc/make.conf:

    PORTDIR_OVERLAY=/usr/local/portage

  * Place the respective ebuild into the correct path under
    /usr/local/portage and create the digest, in case of libgig:

      mkdir /usr/local/portage/media-libs/libgig
      cd /usr/local/portage/media-libs/libgig
      wget http://download.linuxsampler.org/packages/gentoo/libgig-9999.ebuild
      ebuild libgig-9999.ebuild digest

  * finally to emerge the latest version from CVS, i.e.:

      emerge libgig

  * or if you want to emerge your local source files instead, i.e.:

      USE="dev" emerge libgig

The procedure is of course the same for all of our CVS ebuilds.



Minor side notes:

Currently these ebuilds only allow to have one version of the respective
package installed at the same time. That means it doesn't allow to have an
official tarball release and the latest CVS version of the respective package
to be installed at the same time. That's why the version tags of all CVS
ebuilds here are stuck to 9999 (common / official gentoo practice), to make
sure the CVS ebuilds always got priority over tarball release ebuilds.

In future we might want to change this, so we could install an official
release and the CVS version parallel at the same time. According to Gentoo
devs in this case we should add a -cvs/ -svn/ ... suffix for the respective
package name instead. They also mentioned that a _live suffix may be
introduced to portage one of these days too.

[ See the official Gentoo ebuilds of rt2x00 and emacs-cvs as examples for
  both of these practices ]


-- Christian, Thu, 04 Oct 2007 18:52:55 +0200