For the last few months I've been intermittently working on side-project to develop a "Long Term Stable" portage overlay based on Enterprise Linux 6.x Source RPMs.
I've created a git repository at github to share my work so far: https://github.com/mharder/lts6 As it stands right now, with about 50 ebuilds, the project isn't far enough along to be useful. It's more at a "proof-of-concept" stage, but this is a good point to publish what I've got so far, and get broader feedback on the approach. The goal is to develop a portage overlay that offers the customization capabilities of portage while also having the potential for long term support of the core packages. While this approach is probably boring to a great number of Sabayon/Gentoo users, there are places where this combination of stability and flexibility may be desirable. The concept is to use Enterprise Linux (EL) SRPM packages as the source base for a set of long-term-stable (lts) ebuilds. I'm actually using Scientific Linux (which is based on RHEL) as my source, since they've done the work of stripping out contentious trademarks. I was pleasantly surprised to find SRPM packages were structured in a way that is fairly compatible for adoption to an ebuild. It is fairly easy to convert a SRPM package to a tar.gz package. The contents usually consists of three categories of files. The SRPM contains the upstream source tarball, which is usually the same upstream tarball that Gentoo uses. There's a spec file which is the equivalent of an ebuild file. The third group of files is the patches and other miscellaneous config files that are commonly found in an ebuild's 'files' directory. Since many of these ebuilds are significant downgrades, the project may need to mature to the point where I can put together a working Stage 3 before many people can actually make use of ebuilds. So, for right now, I'm looking for any feedback on this concept while I continue to work on it as time allows. Thanks, Mitch.
