Questions about Gentoo and Portage

[redhatJunkie]

Hi all, I've been using Redhat for over 6 months now. While I really like Redhat there are a few odd things that are really starting to annoy me. Looking around at other distros for awhile, trying to find one that met my strict requirements, Gentoo emerged as a strong possibility. I have a few questions about Portage first though. While I would like to let Portage deal with most of my upgrades, there are a few packages I would like to install and upgrade myself from source. With redhat, using RPM, apt-get or whatever, doing that might cause dependancy problems, for example, if package X depends on package Y, and I want to compile package Y from source, I would lose the ability to use RPM or apt-get to update package X for me. This can grow into a big big problem when packages depend on packages that depend on X. And yes, by default redhat will try to install its version of package Y if I try to install any of the packages down the line from package X. Would Portage by any chance be able to detect that I installed Y from source and then go ahead and emerge X without giving me too much trouble?

[PowerFactor]

Well, portage builds form source anyway. And ebuilds are not too difficult to customize if they dont suit you to start with. But yes you can build stuff outside of portage then do an "emerge inject packagename" and portage will consider that package already installed for dependency purposes.