Creating Profiles

Want to create your own custom profiles? Thought up a mix-in that's not currently in the Funtoo profiles? Have an overlay with profiles and want to make it easy for people to use them? Well you've come to the right place. This article will show you how to easily add you own profiles. No more ugly hacking of parent files and other nonsense. Once you follow this guide, not only will portage easily recognize your profiles, they will also show up in eselect right along with the ones from the main tree.

How to do it

Rules to follow

1. You will need a version of eselect that supports Funtoo profiles (already integrated into Funtoo Linux.)
2. Your overlay must have a profiles directory. It must include a repo_name file with the name of your overlay.
3. Your profiles must be inside of the profiles directory
4. You need a profiles.eselect.desc file inside the profiles directory. See profiles.eselect.example in your Funtoo Portage tree for instructions.
5. If you're creating profiles of types arch, build, flavor, or mix-ins, your profile must be inside a directory with same name, such as profiles/my_profile/flavor/new_profile, profiles/my_profile/mix-ins/subdir/profile.
6. Currently NoMix (see profiles.eselect.example) is only supported for profiles in the same tree.
7. If you're not using a standard Funtoo tree, you must ensure that your main Portage tree has profile-formats = portage-2 set in metadata/layout.conf in order for portage to interpret the <repo_name>:<profile> syntax.

Example of how to set up

For our example we will create a mix-ins profile called 'fake_pro' in a local overlay called 'local_overlay'. fake_pro will set the 'dummy' USE flag globally and also set the 'fake' USE flag on sys-apps/not-exist. We will then add the profile to eselect so it's visible when running 'eselect profile'.

Creating the profile

We will use ${OVERLAY_DIR} as the path to local_overlay. These instructions assume the overlay exists. If you haven't set a name for your overlay, do that first:

root # echo "local_overlay" > ${OVERLAY_DIR}/profiles/repo_name

Next lets create a directory to store our profile. Since we're creating a 'mix-ins' profile we need to make sure our profile is inside a 'mix-ins' subdirectory. This is a requirement in order to ensure that the profile will show up in eselect. If your not planning on using eselect then there's no requirement to use 'mix-ins'

root # install -d ${OVERLAY_DIR}/profiles/my_profiles/mix-ins/fake_pro

Now that we have a directory for our profile, lets go ahead and add our settings. Global USE settings go in make.defaults, package specific USE settings go in package.use:

root # cd ${OVERLAY_DIR}/profiles/my_profiles/mix-ins/fake_pro
root # echo 'USE="$USE dummy"' >> make.defaults
root # echo 'sys-apps/not-exist fake' >> package.use

Note that no matter if your using funtoo or gentoo, profile settings all work the same. For more information please check the portage man page.

Adding to eselect

eselect reads from the file profiles.eselect.desc in your profiles/ directory. Format is "Type Name Status NoMix" space-separated. For more information look in /usr/portage/profiles/profiles.eselect.example:

root # echo 'mix-ins my_profiles/mix-ins/fake_pro testing' >> ${OVERLAY_DIR}/profiles/profiles.eselect.desc

Watch the result:

root # eselect profile list