gentoo's portage system info?
 

hello, I'm think (ok, maybe diffidently) going to be installing gentoo on a system I'm upgrading (hardware and OS's, I'm sick of windows, and got the rest of my family to be more or less convinced that linux will be better for surfing the web)

anyways, one thing i hate in linux is the not to organized file structure, i know most files will let you install them to different places by passing options to configure, and some programs have hardcoded file info (like opening /etc/xyz)

what i want to do is put programs in /progs/(sys|x|math|text|net)/(bin|sbin|lib)

changing etc to /config and maybe having that area a bit split into init/net/boot/users/portage

possibly even other non standards changes, i can deal with the hardcoded things myself, but what i want to know is will portage let me change the options it passes to configure the package? or could it at least let me edit the ebuild for the file?

and also when i tell it to update my system will it keep the options i told it to pass to compile the original program to the new update (so it wont use the default /etc /bin /sbin /lib ?

also can portages config files be changed so they have other names without to much trouble?

-thanks

What you want is theoretically possible. You can change the directories with which Gentoo configures packages (use E_SBINDIR, E_LIBEXECDIR, E_DOCDIR, E_SYSCONFDIR, E_INITDIR, E_SPOOLDIR, E_MAN1DIR, E_EXAMPLESDIR, and so forth). All portage commands will read make.conf, so as long as you have them set in there it'll work. Some packages, as you say, have hardcoded paths and won't obey these.

However, it is a VERY BAD IDEA. The hierarchy is such a big part of Unix/Linux that it will be a huge headache to ignore it like you want. Just because the logic is different than you're used to doesn't make it bad.

solnul: thanks, it looks like ill be using sed or at least changing the source files (are there?) for portage then (time to freshen up on python)

but one little thing: some programs will have different install paths that they will require, is there a way to get portage to use a separate E_SBINDIR(just for example) for certain known programs? or have it use ebuilds currently kept on the system to update known programs?

You can specify variables on the command line for one-time use, like "E_SBINDIR=/just/for/this/command E_SYSCONFDIR=/another/dir emerge whatever".

Portage will look in your overlay first (PORTAGE_OVERLAY="a list of dirs separated by spaces"), so you can put your custom ebuilds there.

Let me stress again, though, that you really don't want to do this.

Have you looked at GoboLinux? They're experimenting with a different layout too.

ah, i heard something like that when i first started to look at linux, never remembered the name, and forgot about it till now, thanks .. but i wont want to go with that distro (for one i like portage, will let me compile without me needing to be there while its working, plus i don't think i have the time to get it...... and also i don't like there layout to well, i prefer fairly short simple terms that categorize programs by what they do, and not name/version)

it looks like setting up bash functions to execute the emerge command would be best as i could set it up to fairly easily handle what ill need

and yes, i know i shouldn't... il set up everything tho it will still work, and I'm willing to modify little things if need be, and ill be sure to set up a local install directory for users so they wont have to deal with the sources for the misbehaving programs and get all confused over why its going insane :)

thanks again solnul, you've been incredibly helpful