arch aur / gentoo overlays

There actually is something like this, called portshaker. There aren't too many "overlays" (or any up-to-date ones that I know of), but you can use it to make your own. I use it to overlay updated Xorg ports on top of the latest ports tree for use with poudriere.
 
As a remainder from /usr/ports/CHANGES:
20190903:
AUTHOR: bapt@FreeBSD.org

The ports tree now supports overlays

overlays are a way to help users to integrate their own ports tree
with the official ports tree without having to maintain clone of the
official tree and remerge on regular basis.

The ports tree will lookup in the overlays (in the order the are listed in
OVERLAY variable) for the dependencies and the USES. It will use the first
found.

in order to use it the user have to declare his overlays that way in their
make.conf:
OVERLAYS= overlay1 overlay2 overlay3
To say that, now, the ports tree itself offers the base for it (haven't tested myself).
 
You mean instead of having a single source of trouble, we can now have 127? That sounds greeaaattt. Very Linux-y! Reminds me of why I never want to use Linux.

Or is there a valid technical reason for doing so where we would gain so much?
 
Or is there a valid technical reason for doing so where we would gain so much?
The idea here is that you can have a simple repository with just a single port you're working on and don't have to import an entire ports tree in order for the port's dependencies to get resolved.
 
Back
Top