Am Wed, 8 Feb 2006 09:14:56 -0500 schrieb Arthur Hagen:

Hi, I another Gentoo newbee trying to switch from SuSE. Fortunately I have
an extra unused PC to try stuff out. I hope someone still reads this old
thread and doesn't complain too much about the probably very FAQ-like
question of mine.

>
> If you want a particular piece of software installed, say "stellarium",
> you would do:
>
> emerge stellarium
>
> This will figure out which other packages it depends on, install those
> if not already present, and then install your package. By "install"
> here, it typically means configuring, compiling and installing, without
> you having to do all the steps that compiling yourself from source would
> take, except waiting. And waiting some more.
>
> If you didn't like the package, "emerge --unmerge stellarium" will
> remove it for you.
>

Am I dependent on stellarium existing in the "official" package system?
What if I want to try something that doesn't? In SuSE, for some programs it
typically happened that I wanted to have versions of a program in my system
were SuSE was some steps back. In this case, I just installed the tarball
(or maybe binary, like in Firefox nightlies) in a directory tree outside
the ordinary hierarchy (I chose /opt/local). Will it be like this in Gentoo
as well or is there a possibility to integrate "any old tarball" into the
system so I can take advantage of Gentoo versioning support and avoid
conflicts with things "inside" the official Gentoo area?

Joachim