Stephen001

I've managed to make some progress with a BYOND Gentoo Overlay. An overlay is basically akin to a repository for portage, the package structure an overlay provides is placed on top of the main portage tree in terms of emerge's search / update tree etc. I very much get the feeling I'm the only one using Gentoo, however the installation instructions for the overlay are available here.

This probably doesn't seem like terribly interesting news to Debian/RPM-based distribution users, however it affects those distributions notably. The Gentoo Overlay is my first go at repository management, as well as package creation. I'll get the ability to experiment with how I am dividing up the BYOND suite into packages, in order to promote further Linux tool creation. Currently the overlay just has a byond-core package, providing (near enough) the same thing the download does, it might be best to actually split it more, such as byond-lib, dreammaker, dreamdaemon etc.

The Overlay already offers two benefits over the download. There is the obvious one of package management, the ability to fetch updates through emerge etc. The second is I have been able to dispose of the notion of old-glibc and new-glibc, because the package manager has this information available, and can install as appropriate.

More on this as the Overlay develops.