it was suggested to me that I should post my patch to this ml. So here it is.
Located at http://dev.gentoo.org/~ali_bush/portage_parent_repo_support.patch you will find a patch for repoman to support a hierarchy of overlays by allowing an overlay to specify its parents. I have recently been using this patch over java-experimental to solve the absolute mess "we" have created there. I would like to thank zmedico for the help he has given me on this. Thinks to note/discuss. An overlays parents are specified as a space separated list of pkg_names, with a key of masters, located with a file metadata/layout.conf. eg masters = gentoo java-overlay gentoo is implied and assumed so is not necessary ( and is actually filtered out within the code as it isn't an overlay). The reason I have this is to maintain compatibility with other package managers and because being explicit is a good thing. If we were to change this then it would be sensible to also change the file name. Other package managers also store other variables within this file. I propose that they are just ignored. I have not currently implemented the validation classes that can be used by KeyValuePairFileLoader.
