From 26e39e4ae20c4be9273ca8d5e4923a77278cde6f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Eduardo Trujillo <ed@chromabits.com>
Date: Tue, 24 May 2016 00:01:07 -0400
Subject: [PATCH] feat(posts): Add post on Portage overlay

---
 posts/2016-05-23-portage.md | 67 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 67 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 posts/2016-05-23-portage.md

diff --git a/posts/2016-05-23-portage.md b/posts/2016-05-23-portage.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..957d2ae
--- /dev/null
+++ b/posts/2016-05-23-portage.md
@@ -0,0 +1,67 @@
+---
+title: A wild overlay appears!
+date: Mon May 23 23:21:00 EDT 2016
+author: Eduardo Trujillo
+uuid: a09d1ae8-04d8-43c8-9a64-8945aa77494f
+---
+
+After using Gentoo for a while, I've noticed that while the main portage tree
+has many up-to-date [ebuilds][2], there are still some that lag behind 
+upstream.
+
+The good news is that, if you're a bit adventurous, you can add overlays,
+which, like the name implies, are ebuild trees that are overlaid on top of your
+local tree.
+
+Overlays usually contain software or package versions that are not
+available on the main tree. However, it also means that they might not have
+gone through the same amount of quality assurance than packages from the main
+tree.
+
+Overlays may be personal or maintained by a small group of developers. They
+can also exist just locally on your machine or they can be hosted on a git
+repository.
+
+There's also tools like `layman` which can help you manage overlays used on a
+machine.
+
+So far, my favorite overlays are `gnome`, `steam-overlay`, and `haskell`, which
+provide a recent version of GNOME (3.20), Steam, and up-to-date Haskell
+packages respectively.
+
+However, not everything has an ebuild, even if you look on overlays, so you
+might have to write your own ebuilds.
+
+I've been collecting a couple of these and putting them on my own [personal
+overlay][1] hosted on git. This has allowed me to version them and share them
+across Gentoo machines.
+
+If you are feeling adventurous, you can try it by adding the following file to
+`/etc/portage/repos.conf/chromabits.conf`:
+
+```ini
+[chromabits]
+location = /usr/local/overlay/chromabits
+sync-type = git
+sync-uri = https://phabricator.chromabits.com/diffusion/PORT/portage.git
+auto-sync = yes
+```
+
+However, I cannot guarantee that they will build, install correctly, or not
+start a fire given that I lack the time resources to perform something more
+advanced than "It works on my machine(s)" in terms of QA.
+
+Here a quick summary of a few goodies included:
+
+- **iio-sensor-proxy:** Allows GNOME to automatically adjust the screen
+  brightness.
+- **nm-applet:** A recent version (1.2) of the NetworkManager applet.
+- **corebird:** A recent version (1.2) of a great GTK+ Twitter client. 
+- **slack:** The official Slack client for Linux.
+- **networkmanager:** The latest version of NetworkManager, which has nice
+  features like Wi-Fi power save and MAC address randomization. 
+- **softether-vpn:** The SoftEther VPN server and client. 
+- **syncthing-gtk:** A GTK GUI for Syncthing.
+
+[1]: https://phabricator.chromabits.com/diffusion/PORT/#portage
+[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebuild
-- 
GitLab