[fixed / not necessary] Is it possible to override @system?

[Aquous]

The box I'm currently sitting in front of is running Sabayon. I installed it by first installing Gentoo, and then manually installing equo and installing Sabayon from scratch using that -- see also https://wiki.sabayon.org/index.php?title=HOWTO:_Install_from_an_existing_Linux_system. So now I'm happily running Sabayon, but some of my favorite packages are only available from overlays which Sabayon doesn't have. Therefore, I still use portage from the underlying Gentoo system to manage these packages which aren't available in Sabayon.

Just now I had an insane idea. If I deleted /var/db/pkg (which contained all packages from the stage3 which are now managed by Entropy and should not be touched by Gentoo anymore) and re-installed all my Portage packages in a fully pristine /var/db/pkg, I would be able to easily track updates to my Portage-managed packages by running 'emerge -u --nodeps world'. This wouldn't be possible if I had kept my stage3's /var/db/pkg because then Portage would also try to update the stage3 packages, which are no longer managed by Portage and would completely break my system if it tried to reinstall them.

So now I have an empty /var/db/pkg save for the packages I explicitly want Portage to manage. All is well now. However, there's one small snag in my plan: when I run 'emerge -u --nodeps world', Portage also wants to pull in all packages that are part of the @system set. They are no longer in /var/db/pkg because I didn't want Portage to try to updtae them, but now of course it thinks they aren't even installed. That was the idea, I know, but I'd like to be able to tell Portage that it shouldn't worry about these packages because they do in fact exist and are just managed behind its back.

So, I'd like to ask: is it possible to override the @system set? I could edit the files in /usr/portage but they'd get overwritten every time I ran 'emerge --sync'

(In retrospect, it would probably have been a better idea to keep those packages listed in /var/db/pkg and just mask any newer versions. But that wouldn't be as interesting (nor would it be correct, at least from my point of view: I'd be lying to Portage that the packages were fixed at their stage3-install-time versions instead of just telling it the packages simply aren't its to manage))

[steveL]

[Aquous]

[Genone]

Use @selected instead of @world to skip @system packages (@world is simply the combination of @selected+@system). This could require using portage-2.2.

[Aquous]