FAQ: Repository Questions
Profiles vs Profiles
Don't confuse the profiles/ directory with the profiles
= setting for e format repositories. The special files
immediately under profiles/, such as
profiles/thirdpartymirrors, profiles/use.desc
and profiles/package.mask, are specific to the repository and not
to the profiles that are specified below them. Thus, the profiles =
key has no effect upon them but is rather where repository masks are defined.
Repository names
Because of a requirement forced into GLEP 42 by the peanut gallery, repositories are required to be uniquely identifiable. The identifier must remain consistent even if a repository is moved, either locally or remotely, and thus must be independent of user configuration.
For e format repositories, this is controlled by the profiles/repo_name
file. It should contain a single string with no whitespace or funny characters.
For many repositories, this has already been created for you; for some overlays,
probably including your local overlay if you have one, the file is not yet
there so you will have to create it.
If a repository has not yet been synced, or if it does not contain a repo_name,
Paludis will try to auto-generate a repository name for it. The generated name will start
with x-. Paludis will not attempt to generate a name without the x-
prefix to avoid strange collisions.
The name of a repository has nothing to do with the filename of the configuration
file in confdir/paludis/repositories/.