If you maintain local ebuilds, either homebrew or downloaded from Gentoo Bugzilla, you should consider this idea.

I always kept my custom ebuild files in /usr/local/portage and later /usr/portage/local. It’s really annoying to use sudo all the time to create, edit and copy ebuilds, digests and other files.

Then I simply created ~/.portage.

Then it was simply a matter of adding it to $PORTDIR_OVERLAY in /etc/make.conf and changing ownerships. Now it’s a lot easier to bump versions, edit ebuilds, add patches, etc. I can even download the tarball running ebuild package-version.ebuild digest as a regular user! The only thing I need to sudo is merging a package into the system.

I did have some concerns about security, but then I thought: this is a personal computer.

Would you try it?