After installing/extracting a stage3 tarball, I do not see an /etc/portage folder. It would be nice if there were stubs in /etc/portage for the following files (which most people will eventually create a package.keywords file to arch unmask a package. Stubs for package.unmask, package.mask, package.use would also be nice. There may be some package.* files that I am unaware of. Some files in /etc/conf.d have stubs to help users configure their network, clock, default editor, timezone, etc. Man pages for the package.* files may also be helpful, like the manpage entry for make.conf. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Extract a stage3 tarball. 2. There is no /etc/portage folder, and there are no stubs for package.* Actual Results: 1. User emerges a package that is arch masked. 3. User wonders why portage isn't letting the user install a package. 4. User searches online and reads the handbook until they learn they have to modify /etc/portage/package.keywords and add their package name in that file. 5. They see that the directory /etc/portage does not exist, and are lost. They do not understand the meaning behind _why_ a package is masked. They go ahead and create a /etc/portage directory, create a package.keyword file, add their package names. The problem is step 4. Search engines and handbooks are great, but having to use it to figure out how to get around the most common of issues is a barrier to entry. Expected Results: When a user encounters the emerge warning, they first assume something is broken. They are not aware that package masking is used to protect the user from breaking their system or upgrading to a broken version of software. The message portage gives should indicate (or at least hint) to either a package.keywords or package.unmask file they need to modify in order to continue (at their own risk). Stubs would be helpful for a new user who wants to get the latest bleeding edge version of a package (or a known stable version of a package that has not been unmasked in portage). Many new users ask why emerge complains about 'masked packages' and may wonder why an /etc/portage directory doesn't exist.
I'm not sure if stubs would be worth the extra clutter. As it is, the /etc/portage/package.* can be viewed with `man portage` and there's a reference to that in the "masked packages" section of `man emerge`.
If adding templates, I'd suggest to use /etc/portage/package.$foo/99_example instead of single files.
I'd be happy with the portage ebuild just creating /etc/portage and dropping a .keep* in there. I'm always annoyed that I have to create the dir for new installs.
The idea to make these stubs sounds good because this is an integral part of portage. By the way: Installing stage3 with amd64 architecture (2 weeks ago) will create this sub dirs, installing x86 architecture dont.
