>> I think what we really need is a better way >> to install only certain packages from an overlay. > > This is against the idea of an overlay: If you want only cerain packages > copy them into your local overlay and do not add the whole overlay > to portage. (But you might get troubles if you do not use eclasses > or other ebuilds from the overlay which might contain corresponding > patches).
Surely you can see the value in finding an ebuild for a package you like that isn't in portage, adding the overlay associated with that ebuild via layman, somehow specifying that you only want that package from the overlay, and running 'layman -S' to stay on top of version bumps. If I understand your suggestion correctly, it would involve manually checking for version bumps and recopying them into the local overlay. That doesn't seem very Gentoo. - Grant
