Development Guide

Overview

Okay, so you want to get involved. How do you do it? Well, here's how we want you to start:

First, make sure you have the current release of Funtoo Linux installed on at least one system.
Find things that need fixing on the bug tracker, and submit fixes for them (see video below on how.)
If you have a new ebuild, submit a pull request to flora or the Naval Computational Science and Engineering Overlay.
Testing things and finding bugs is also a form of help.
Help us document stuff on the wiki. See How to 'wiki'.
Hang out in Funtoo Discord or Funtoo Telegram Channel and chat with us.
Learn more about ebuilds by perusing the documentation below. Ask questions. Try out Metro.
Announcements are posted to the News and Announcements section of Funtoo Forums.
To track other updates, such as wiki updates, subscribe to funtoo's RSS and Atom feeds.

Getting Started

To get started with Funtoo development, it's strongly recommended that you first watch the following video, which will introduce you to code.funtoo.org and explain how to use it to fork a repository and create a pull request. Forking a repository and creating a pull request is the best way to start doing Funtoo development:

Here is a follow-up video with close to an hour of tutorial-style instruction:

Funtoo Distinctives

To get familiar with Funtoo Linux internals, such as kit-fixups, and how they work, please be sure to read the following pages:

Ebuild Writing

To learn more about ebuilds and how to write them, the following pages are available:

Portage Variables -- learn about all those variables inside an ebuild, and in make.conf.
Ebuild Functions -- src_unpack, src_compile -- these are ebuild functions. There are others. See all of them and learn how they work.
Ebuild for package without sources -- how to make a package with no sources.

For a more comprehensive reference of all the details of ebuild development, please see the Gentoo Development Manual.

Advanced Topics

If you are maintaining several ebuilds for Funtoo, you may find it more convenient to maintain your own overlay and have us pull new versions of ebuilds from you, rather than having to create a pull request. For information on how to do this, see Creating Your Own Overlay.

Even more advanced users may want to use our own tree update scripts to generate their own customized meta-repo and kits. For information on how to do this, see Creating Your Own Meta-Repo and Kits. This document also covers the functionality of our tree update scripts in detail, and will give you some insight into how to work with the kit-fixups repository effectively.

To learn how to build your own Funtoo stages, please look at documentation for Metro.

Pages that need updating

Warning

These pages are stale and need updating!

Forking An Ebuild -- explains how to take an ebuild from Gentoo and fork it, so you can make local changes.
Portage (Funtoo) -- learn about Funtoo changes to Portage (needs updating).
Portage Dynamic Slot - dynamic SLOT functionality now in Portage.