Fixing a broken portage....

[DIZ]

I have been using gentoo/prefix/portage on a PowerPC for over a year now with little or no worries/problems. But something has happened, and after a week of trying to figure it out myself I'm asking for help.

The first issue was that sync stopped working unless I used "sudo".

Then portage kept wanting an update. The problem is that when I try to update portage, I've started getting the following error messages:

!!! Problem with sandbox binary. Disabling...

and:

!!! Invalid db entry: /Volumes/SNARK/gentoo/var/db/pkg/app-admin/python-updater-0.10-r02.1
!!! Invalid db entry: /Volumes/SNARK/gentoo/var/db/pkg/sys-devel/binutils-config-3-r03.1
!!! Invalid db entry: /Volumes/SNARK/gentoo/var/db/pkg/sys-devel/gcc-config-1.8-r00.1
Calculating dependencies
!!! Invalid db entry: /Volumes/SNARK/gentoo/var/db/pkg/app-admin/python-updater-0.10-r02.1
!!! Invalid db entry: /Volumes/SNARK/gentoo/var/db/pkg/sys-devel/binutils-config-3-r03.1
!!! Invalid db entry: /Volumes/SNARK/gentoo/var/db/pkg/sys-devel/gcc-config-1.8-r00.1
!!! Invalid db entry: /Volumes/SNARK/gentoo/var/db/pkg/sys-libs/ncurses-5.9-r02.1
Invalid ebuild name: /Volumes/SNARK/gentoo/usr/portage/sys-libs/zlib/zlib-1.2.3-r01.1.ebuild

and:

ImportError: cannot import name rootuser

and:

configure: error: bad value for --with-root-user

I've found old bugs in the online docs and forums, but none seems to fit this situation....

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[eccerr0r]

Well, what's confusing: You should have to be root to emerge --sync. Thus this is normal that you use sudo. Do not chown/chmod /usr/portage/* tree to a regular user, at best it needs to be owned by portage. You can remove /usr/portage/metadata/timestamp to force a sync. Make sure it succeeds, there will be trouble with a broken portage tree.

Now it appears you are not using a native Gentoo system and using a chroot of sorts? Normal Gentoo systems' package database should be in /var/db/pkg/* and nothing prepended to it...

That being said, having files corrupted in /var/db/pkg is kind of bad. You could fix it by re-emerging those packages.

But it would be nice to know what kind of system you have here...
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

[DIZ]

Sorry for any confusion. I'm not running gentoo as my base system on a Mac; I have a separate Gentoo prefix that I use for my programming work. So it is self-contained, and I don't use the Mac-supplied Unix apps, for example. I've never had to use "sudo" to do emerge --sync or updates or anything until recently.

[DIZ]

When I try to run emerge --sync without sudo, this is the error I get:

emerge --sync
>>> Synchronization of repository 'gentoo_prefix' located in '/Volumes/SNARK/gentoo/usr/portage'...
>>> Starting rsync with rsync://91.191.147.229/gentoo-portage-prefix...
>>> Checking server timestamp ...
[Errno 1] Operation not permitted:
/Volumes/SNARK/gentoo/usr/bin/rsync --recursive --links --safe-links --perms --times --omit-dir-times --compress --force --whole-file --delete --stats --human-readable --timeout=180 --exclude=/distfiles --exclude=/local --exclude=/packages --verbose rsync://91.191.147.229/gentoo-portage-prefix/metadata/timestamp.chk /Volumes/SNARK/gentoo/var/tmp/tmp1Hrij5
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Volumes/SNARK/gentoo/usr/lib/portage/pym/portage/process.py", line 305, in spawn
unshare_net, unshare_ipc, cgroup)
File "/Volumes/SNARK/gentoo/usr/lib/portage/pym/portage/process.py", line 491, in _exec
os.setgid(int(gid))
File "/Volumes/SNARK/gentoo/usr/lib/portage/pym/portage/__init__.py", line 259, in __call__
rval = self._func(*wrapped_args, **wrapped_kwargs)
OSError: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted
* Rsync has reported that there is a syntax error. Please ensure
* that sync-uri attribute for repository 'gentoo_prefix' is proper.
* sync-uri: 'rsync://rsync.prefix.freens.org/gentoo-portage-prefix'

[nosmo]

Sorry to dredge up an ancient thread but I couldn't find anyone else having the same problem. This problem is introduced in portage 2.2.1 (I think) when userpriv and usersync were added to FEATURES by default, and my prefix installation required me to add FEATURES="-userfetch -userpriv -sandbox -usersandbox -usersync" to my make.conf to fix it.