As an example given the django-9999 ebuild, to match the developers environment I need to checkout R12120 from trunk. Installing Django manually is not option due to package management reasons. But there is also no ebuild in portage for 1.2 beta versions.

So I did the following:

ESVN_OPTIONS="-r12120" emerge -1a django

Which installed the required revision from svn. But this is cumbersome in a way. Is there some way to define this statically per ebuild, eg something like:

DJANGO_SVN_REV="12120"

in make.conf. This would be much cleaner in my eyes.

Because next time I need to rebuild django for whatever reason, I need to remember: "Oh I wanted this to stick to a specific revision" and next question will be "err, f&!#$?%, what was it again?"

What's the best way to go here?

Keep in mind:

• Manually installing packages without package manager knowledge is no option
• Working around with manual emerge variable prefixing is no option
• Setting up a /etc/portage/package.env would be a way to go (as described here) but that seems pretty unsupported and kludgy to me and thus unpreferable
• Modifying make.conf would be a way to go
• Keeping the ebuild in an overlay would be an option