Overlay

An overlay is a source of software outside the official Portage tree—layer it on top and you can install packages that aren’t in the official repos. gentoo-zh is one of the long-standing ones: it grew out of gentoo-tw (started in 2003) and the later gentoo-china, when the two communities merged. The source lives on GitHub.

By now gentoo-zh carries over 450 packages, roughly in these categories:

• Chinese / CJK: the fcitx input methods plus a whole pile of plugins and rime tables (rime, chinese-addons, etc.), Sogou / Moegirl / zhwiki pinyin dictionaries, CJK fonts, and CJK patches for various pieces of software
• Networking, dev tools, and other stuff not yet in the official repos: we’re Gentoo users, after all—who doesn’t have a few packages they maintain themselves
• Patched desktop / performance kernels: cachyos-sources, xanmod, liquorix, and friends
• Keeping up with new releases: for packages the official repos have nobody looking after, we keep shipping new versions over here
• Bug fixes: when a developer hits a bug, the fix gets pushed straight back into the repo

One rule: don’t break people’s systems. Every ebuild gets tested on the arches it supports before it goes in.

Adding gentoo-zh

The easiest way is to enable it with eselect repository (install app-eselect/eselect-repository first):

eselect repository enable gentoo-zh
emerge --sync gentoo-zh

[gentoo-zh]
location = /var/db/repos/gentoo-zh
sync-type = git
sync-uri = https://github.com/microcai/gentoo-zh.git
auto-sync = yes

Mirrors for mainland China

If connecting straight to GitHub or the official distfiles is slow for you, switch gentoo-zh over to a mainland China mirror. The ones below have all been tested and work; they’re collected from peeweep’s announcement—thanks!

git sync source

Point the overlay’s sync source at a mainland mirror (gentoo-zh is a full ebuild mirror of microcai/gentoo-zh—ebuilds only, no source code). Available addresses:

• Chongqing University: https://mirrors.cqu.edu.cn/git/gentoo-zh.git
• Nanjing University: https://mirror.nju.edu.cn/git/gentoo-zh.git

Adding it for the first time (install git first):

sudo emerge -aq dev-vcs/git          # install git if you don't have it
rm -rf /var/db/repos/gentoo-zh       # clear out the old one if you've synced before
eselect repository add gentoo-zh git https://mirrors.cqu.edu.cn/git/gentoo-zh.git
emerge --sync gentoo-zh

If you’ve already added it, just change the sync-uri in /etc/portage/repos.conf/gentoo-zh.conf to either address above.

distfiles cache

Speeds up downloading package source code. The origin is https://distfiles.gentoocn.org/; available mirrors:

• Chongqing University: https://mirrors.cqu.edu.cn/gentoo-zh/
• Nanjing University: https://mirror.nju.edu.cn/gentoo-zh

In GENTOO_MIRRORS in /etc/portage/make.conf, append after the official mirrors:

GENTOO_MIRRORS="${GENTOO_MIRRORS} https://distfiles.gentoocn.org"

Using packages from the overlay

All gentoo-zh packages are ~arch (testing) keyworded—nothing is marked stable. Systems already running ~amd64 (the testing branch) can just emerge them directly; on a stable branch system you’ll need to accept the testing keyword for these packages before installing.

Allow individual packages as you need them (recommended—only accept what you actually use):

echo "app-foo/bar ~amd64" >> /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/gentoo-zh
emerge --ask app-foo/bar

Or allow the whole overlay (convenient, but it pulls in a lot more testing packages along the way—your call):

echo "*/*::gentoo-zh ~amd64" >> /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/gentoo-zh

To see what packages the overlay offers: eix -RO gentoo-zh.

Contributing

We’d love help building out gentoo-zh: open a pull request on the GitHub repository, and if you find a problem, issues are welcome too.