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.

Rules to follow

• What your system need:
  • The version of eselect that supports Funtoo profiles (already integrated into Funtoo Linux)
• What your overlay need:
  • Directory <overlay_name>/profiles: store your profiles in it.
  • File <overlay_name>/profiles/repo_name: store the name of your overlay
  • File <overlay_name>/profiles/profiles.eselect.desc: see profiles.eselect.example in your Funtoo portage tree for instruction.
  • 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 <overlay_name>/profiles/<profile_name>/flavor/<flavor_name>, <overlay_name>/profiles/<profile_name>/mix-ins/<mix-ins_name>

   Note

Currently, NoMix (see profiles.eselect.example in the Funtoo portage tree) is only supported for profiles in the same tree.

Also:

   Note

If you are not using a standard Funtoo portage 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.

An Example

• For our example, we will create a local overlay called fake_overlay. Then, create a profile called fake_profile. Finally, create a 'mix-ins' profile called fake_mix-ins:
  • Set the dummy USE flag globally for fake_mix-ins
  • Set the yummy USE flag on sys-apps/not-exist for fake_mix-ins

We will then add this profile to eselect so it's visible when running:

root # eselect profile

Creating the profile

Step 1

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

root # echo "fake_overlay" > ${FAKE_OVERLAY}/profiles/repo_name

Step 2

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 ${FAKE_OVERLAY}/profiles/fake_profile/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 ${FAKE_OVERLAY}/profiles/fake_profile/mix-ins/fake_pro
root # echo 'USE="$USE dummy"' >> make.defaults
root # echo 'sys-apps/not-exist yummy' >> package.use

   Note

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

   Note

For more information about this Format, Please look in /usr/portage/profiles/profiles.eselect.example

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

Watch the result:

root # eselect profile list