Layman

Layman is Gentoo's primary overlay management tool, offering centralized repository management for end users.

Features
With users can manage their overlays in a simple, centralized manner. The layman application provides an overview of available remote overlay repositories and allows the user to select one or more for the system. Once selected, the user can update the repositories (similar to emerge --sync), add local overlays, and more.

Installing layman
Installing layman is a breeze. First check the USE flags that the layman package supports; most of the USE flags trigger which kinds of remote repository types layman supports (such as git repositories, cvs repositories ...).

Next install the layman package:

Insert a reference to layman in :

This will ensure that Portage, when asked, will check the content of the various overlays managed by layman. In effect, it will set the  variable, so if you already define that one in, make sure that you do not overwrite the value that layman already provides.

Using layman
The layman man page (see External resources) provides a full overview of the available functions within layman. However, for most users, the following commands suffice for overlay management activities.

To fetch and display a list of all the overlays:

To add an overlay in the list:

To remove an overlay from the local list:

To update a specific overlay:

To update all overlays:

Mountable overlays
With the addition of layman-2.2.0 comes the support for squashfs overlay types. layman will interact with squashfs overlays by mounting them as read-only on the filesystem. On the initial install of the squashfs overlay, it will be mounted as read-only. However, after a reboot the overlay will no longer be mounted and the ebuilds in that overlay will not be accessible by the system.

In order to assist users in handling these mountable overlays, a utility was added that goes by the name of layman-mounter.

To find all overlays that are currently mounted, type:

To find all overlays that are installed by layman that can be mounted, type:

To mount the mountable overlays, type:

To unmount the overlays, type:

Setting overlay priorities with layman
As each overlay is assigned a unique priority, layman provides a simple way of defining priorities for overlays it manages. For more information about overlay priorities see the overlay article.

The file contains some information about the overlays, among which is the priority attribute in the repo tag. The number there determines only the priority relative to the other overlay entries, 50 is the default value. layman then analyses this file and sets the order of the overlay entries in the  variable defined in.

As the file is automatically generated by layman based on the settings in, it is strongly recommended that only  is used to set the priorities.

To add your personal overlay, and to ensure that your overlay has a higher priority, add your overlay before is sourced.

However, this can be also "fooled" by defining the  in  after  has been sourced.

This "trick" is merely an opportunity offered by shell variable expansion.

Adding custom overlays
To add overlays which are not listed when layman -L is ran add XML files into. For example:

NEW: With the addition of layman-2.2.0 a new utility was added to assist users in this process that goes by the name of layman-overlay-maker. As long as you know the information of the overlay that you're trying to add this utility will create the overlay XML for you and save into or whatever path value you have specified in the layman configuration file for overlay_defs.

layman-overlay-maker can become a useful tool in assisting users who would like to submit a patch to have their overlays added to the official repositories.xml file.

To use the utility simply invoke it by name:

and go through its prompts until completion.

When finished run:

External resources

 * Layman Homepage on Sourceforge.net