After running emerge sync today emerge has been completely broken. Not even emerge --help works. Every time I tried to run emerge I got the message: Performing Global Updates: /usr/portage/profiles/updates/4Q-2005 (Could take a couple of minutes if you have a lot of binary packages.)
After running emerge sync today emerge has been completely broken. Not even emerge --help works. Every time I tried to run emerge I got the message: Performing Global Updates: /usr/portage/profiles/updates/4Q-2005 (Could take a couple of minutes if you have a lot of binary packages.) .='update pass' *='binary update' @='/var/db move' s='/var/db SLOT move' S='binary SLOT move' p='update /etc/portage/package.*' .Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/bin/emerge", line 10, in ? import portage File "/usr/lib/portage/pym/portage.py", line 7480, in ? do_upgrade(mykey) File "/usr/lib/portage/pym/portage.py", line 7385, in do_upgrade key=dep_getkey(line.split()[0]) File "/usr/lib/portage/pym/portage.py", line 3609, in dep_getkey if mydep[-1]=="*": IndexError: string index out of range I tried using portage-rescue but I ended up with error messages identical to the one above except for the line numbers (due to the different portage version used). I tried moving /usr/portage out of the way and I was then able to run emerge sync again, but once a new /usr/portage had been created I got the same problem as before. I tried running python-updater, but this relies on emerge and therefore failed.
It seems that what the error messages were trying to tell me was that I had the invalid atom "* media-video/mpeg4ip" in my /etc/portage/package.mask (it should have been "# media-video/mpeg4ip").
