I just noticed that when running a command like `quickpkg bzip2' for the first time you may see the following failure: "No write access to /usr/portage/packages". The way forward is to create the directory and try again. Although this is not so hard to find out I think the message is slightly misleading: It suggests that the directory exists but is write protected or owned by the wrong user or such. So, my humble suggestion: quickpkg should check for existence of the directory. In case it does not exist, attempt to create it as if using a `mkdir -p' command. If successful, go ahead, else fail with a diagnostic. However, there may be reasons to preserve the current behaviour (quickpkg fails if the directory has not yet been created) that I am not aware of. In that case at least the diagnostic message could be improved, stating that the directory does not exist. Also then the manpage should perhaps state that the directory must exist before using the quickpkg command.
This has been released in 2.1.4_rc1.