Since portage-2.2_rc29 there is support for a metadata/layout.conf file in an overlay which is used to specify names of repositories which satisfy dependencies on eclasses and/or ebuilds. See the QA Overlay Layout support thread on the gentoo-dev mailing list for information about why this is necessary, and refer to the portage(5) man page for details about the layout.conf format
If you want overlay eclasses to override eclasses from other repos then you’ll want to refer to the portage(5) man page for information about the /etc/portage/repos.conf file which can be used to specify site-specific repository configuration information. Note that configuration settings which are specified in repos.conf do not apply to tools such as repoman(1) and egencache(1), since operations performed by these tools are inherently not site-specific.
Since portage-2.2_rc31, repos.conf can be used to create repository aliases, in case you want to substitute one repo for another one that is specified in layout.conf. This is especially useful for funtoo users, who may want something like this in /etc/portage/repos.conf:
[funtoo]
aliases = gentoo