[gentoo-dev] Portage newbie needs help

[Dominic Leland]

Hi everyone,

I've been using Gentoo, off and on, since rc3 (I believe). When rc4-pre2 came out, I wanted to go head-first into it. Unfortunately, I always mess up my system with portage. Back then, when I would update portage, my pkgmerge would be broken. With almost no software installed (and not enough energy to compile everything from source) I would reinstall and ignore portage.

Back when I first tried this, I read a post here on gentoo-dev saying that the portage I was using was broken and would be fixed soon. I left Gentoo alone for a while. I wanted to wait for rc5 and give portage a little more time to develop.

With all of the documentation improvements and a few portage updates, I decided to try it again. I still have a broken portage/pkgmerge, but I did get a little further last time. Just to compare, I am going to list the steps I took this time:

1.Install Gentoo according to the Installation guide. FYI, in case you want to know, here's how my partitions are set up:
/dev/hda1    VFAT    ~25GB    Windows
/dev/hda2    VFAT    ~25GB    Windows (data)
/dev/hda3    reiserfs    150MB    /boot
/dev/hda4                   25GB    extended
/dev/hda5    reiserfs    4GB    /
/dev/hda6    swap       250MB

(I'm planning on following Daniel's article on LVM - I'm leaving a bunch of unallocated space after the swap)

2.Downloaded the latest (I think) rsync.
3.Rsync'ed the portage tree.
4.ebuild portage-x.y.z.ebuild merge -- This part suprisingly worked - it didn't last time.

Even though portage seemed to merge fine, it would always fail whenever I would go into any other directory and try to do an "ebuild package-x.y.z.ebuild merge." I kept getting a "package already installed - unmerge first" error (even on things I knew weren't installed like Gnome-1.4).

The document's next step, assuming ebuilding worked, was to unmerge the existing file, but since I had just started my /var/db/pkg tree, I wouldn't have entries for anything I was upgrading.

Since the last time I tried this seemed to break my pkgmerge, I tried to merge some packages off of CDROM. Nope. I keep getting errors (something like "index out of range"). 

I'm really anxious to get my system up and running and upgradable. I like how the newer portage is recursive. Any help from the portage adepts is much appreciated.

Thank you.

Dominic Leland