As a developer, one of the great things I love about Gentoo (Linux distribution with BSD 'ports-like' package management) is the feeling it gives you that eveything you do to your system has an undo button. (For the record, I have at least come to my senses about this need in a production situation.)  A great example of this is layman, which I think is fair to say is a slightly more intuitive version of managing an apt sources file.  Today I realised there is a portage overlay (for use with layman) that I have been missing out on and perhaps it's because it's a fairly recent addition but it comes just in time for me to try and get more serious about hacking in Perl.

With the perl-experimental overlay I anticipated the knock-on effect might be that I am no longer tempted to write a script for keeping my /etc/portage/package.keywords file sorted alphabetically automatically.  I was half-right (thanks to a useful awk command from the Gentoo wiki) but in the end this need paled in significance compared to the delights of coming across a more up-to-date utility for handling cpan builds and then ending up with a system for reliably predicting where generated ebuilds from this utility will land in the filesystem. Not that it matters that much, I suppose.

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