A Gentoo portage overlay providing ebuilds for libfvde and all its supporting libraries from the libyal project.

• Design Decisions - Major architectural and implementation decisions
• Python Bindings - Details on Python support and rationale
• Build Order - Dependency order and build instructions

This overlay provides 18 packages:

• 17 supporting libraries from https://github.com/libyal (error handling, data structures, I/O, crypto, etc.)
• 1 main library: libfvde for accessing FileVault Drive Encryption (FVDE/FileVault2) encrypted volumes

All packages are live (-9999) ebuilds that fetch from GitHub using git-r3.eclass.

1. The overlay is already configured in /etc/portage/repos.conf/libfvde-overlay.conf

2. Install packages in dependency order (see BUILD_ORDER.md) or let portage handle it:

# Install everything
sudo emerge -av dev-libs/libfvde::libfvde-overlay

# Or install specific libraries
sudo emerge -av dev-libs/libcerror::libfvde-overlay

By default, all libraries build as shared libraries (.so files).

To build as static libraries instead:

echo "dev-libs/libcerror static-libs" >> /etc/portage/package.use/libfvde
# Repeat for other libraries as needed

When static-libs is enabled:

• Libraries become build-time only dependencies (not runtime)
• Static archives (.a) are installed
• Libtool archives (.la) are preserved

• fuse - Build FUSE filesystem support for mounting FVDE volumes
• python - Build Python bindings (pyfvde)
• tools - Install fvdetools command-line utilities (default: enabled)
• keyring - Linux kernel keyring support for key management (default: enabled)
• nls - Native language support
• static-libs - Build static library

Each library:

1. Fetches source from GitHub using git-r3.eclass
2. Applies a patch to remove embedded library directories
3. Runs autogen.sh and eautoreconf
4. Configures with system library dependencies
5. Builds and installs shared libraries (or static with USE flag)

All libraries (except libcerror which has no dependencies) include a patch in files/:

• 0001-Remove-embedded-dependencies-for-system-library-buil.patch

These patches modify Makefile.am and configure.ac to:

• Remove embedded library subdirectories from SUBDIRS
• Remove AC_CONFIG_FILES for embedded libraries
• Update build targets to not recurse into embedded library directories

This allows each library to be built standalone using system-installed dependencies instead of the embedded copies that libyal projects typically use.

• libcerror - Error handling
• libclocale - Locale functions
• libcnotify - Notification functions
• libcsplit - String splitting
• libfguid - GUID/UUID handling
• libhmac - HMAC functions
• libcaes - AES encryption

• libcthreads - Threading (→ libcerror)
• libuna - Unicode/ASCII conversions (→ libcerror)
• libcdata - Generic data structures (→ libcerror, libcthreads)
• libcfile - File I/O (→ libcerror, libclocale, libcnotify, libuna)
• libcpath - Path handling (→ libcerror, libclocale, libcsplit, libcnotify, libuna)
• libfcache - File cache (→ libcerror, libcdata, libcthreads)
• libbfio - Basic file I/O abstraction (→ libcerror, libcdata, libcfile, libcpath, libcthreads, libuna)
• libfvalue - File value types (→ libcerror, libcdata, libcnotify, libuna)
• libfplist - Property list handling (→ libcerror, libfguid, libcdata, libcnotify)
• libfdata - File data types (→ libcerror, libcdata, libcnotify, libcthreads, libfcache)

• libfvde - FileVault Drive Encryption library (→ all 17 libraries above + zlib)

If you need to regenerate patches for a library:

cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/libyal/LIBNAME.git LIBNAME-patch
cd LIBNAME-patch
# Edit Makefile.am and configure.ac to remove embedded dependencies
git add Makefile.am configure.ac
git commit -m "Remove embedded dependencies for system library build"
git format-patch -1 -o /var/db/repos/libfvde-overlay/dev-libs/LIBNAME/files/

After modifying an ebuild or patch:

cd /var/db/repos/libfvde-overlay/dev-libs/LIBNAME
ebuild LIBNAME-9999.ebuild manifest

• libfvde: https://github.com/libyal/libfvde
• libyal project: https://github.com/libyal
• Gentoo git-r3.eclass: https://devmanual.gentoo.org/eclass-reference/git-r3.eclass/

Ebuilds and patches: GPL-2 (per Gentoo policy) Upstream libraries: LGPL-3+ (see individual project repositories)