As discussed with dev-zero on irc: It would be nice if we could standardise package manager selection in different tools. app-admin/eselect and app-admin/emacs-updater already use the PACKAGE_MANAGER variable (with allowed values "portage" (default), "pkgcore", or "paludis") for this purpose.
Created attachment 193762 [details, diff] Proposed patch Attached patch will make python-updater respect the PACKAGE_MANAGER variable. (It will still be possible to override this by specifying the -P option.)
Fixed in app-admin/python-updater-0.7.