Making a sabayon package.

Like deb and rpm, there're also Sabayon packages but cause Sabayon is not known much, such packages are hard to be found. Most probably you will not pass through a scenario where you will actually not get a package you need inside the official Sabayon repository, but if you do, here I'll state what you can do to resolve the issue.

Since Sabayon is based on Gentoo, everything that works in Gentoo, also works in Sabayon including ebuilds which might be commonly considered as Gentoo packages and Ebuilds are found at a very large number, if you did not find a Sabayon package, you will get an Ebuild and you can make the Sabayon package from this. To get the ebuild search in http://www.gentoo-portage.com, or http://bugs.gentoo.org or http://gpo.zugaina.org/ download it and place it in /usr/portage/app-misc/<package name>/<place the ebuild here in the name format <package name>-<version>.ebuild>.

Example if we have an ebuild named limewire-5.0.0.ebuild then place it in /usr/portage/app-misc/limewire/

Make the directories if they are not available. The ebuild name should strictly be limewire-<version>, that is in general <package name>-<version>. The directory where this ebuild will be placed in the app-misc directory, should be named <package name>, in this case, limewire. Now drop to the the root prompt.

Next, you need to create a manifest of the ebuild by -

ebuild <ebuild with complete location> manifest

then you can safely emerge with -

emerge limewire

From here on, there're primarily 2 ways by which you can make a Sabayon package, for one of them run the following commands first -

equo rescue spmsync

Actually emerge is set to do this automatically after merging any package, but do this again just in case it does not happen.

As of the insides on how this works, entropy (the binary package manager of Sabayon) has a separate database to that of portage, but both need to have the same packages recorded as installed, to make out for the differences, we run equo rescue spmsync so Limewire gets recorded in the entropy database and now the package will be installed in Sabayon, you can see it in Sulfur as installed.

Next to build a package off it -

equo smart  quickpkg <package name>

This will be placed in /var/lib/entropy/tmp by default, override by the switch --savedir.

You should have an entropy package there.

Now let's discuss another way of creating a Sabayon packages from Gentoo binaries which where made during compile time by portage (using --buildpkg or quickpkg), assuming you have such a binary, just -

equo smart inflate <gentoo binary>

And the resultant Sabayon package will be placed in /var/lib/entropy/tmp.

For this technique, you just need to have the gentoo binary, neither the ebuild nor you need to emerge it through portage.

You can install a Sabayon package with sulfur by going to file>install from binaries...

alternatively -

equo <the Sabayon binary>

You don't need to worry about the dependencies, they get sorted out by the Sabayon package automatically. Any dependency in the ebuild or the Gentoo binary will be loaded into the Sabayon package.

Request your Sabayon package, I'll try to make them.