After an "emerge sync", emerge seems to be broken. Wont work at all anymore. Updating the portage tree by doing an "emerge sync" on 03/10/12 around 05:50pm CET ran fine and SEEMED to finish nicely (others didn't have that kind of luck, the emerge sync process aborted with the error message below, see first post of http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=113831). Running "emerge sync" a second time (or any other emerge command, i.e. "emerge vim") on 03/10/12, around 06:30pm CET results in the following error message: # emerge sync !!! Invalid token (not "=") !!! Parse error in /etc/make.defaults. Never modify this file. !!! 'emerge sync' may fix this. If it does not then please report !!! this to bugs.gentoo.org and, if possible, a dev on #gentoo (IRC) There is no /etc/make.defaults on the system. And I don't think there ever was. This problem seems to occur only when syncing the portage tree against one of the main european mirrors [(unfortunately I have no way of recalling which it was) not sure, but the people having the same problem are from Ireland, UK, France and Austria, all in Europe, see also http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=113831] Steps to reproduce: When having synced against this server, just trying to run "emerge sync" results in the above error message. The actual result is that emerge is completely unusable now, nothing can be built, downloaded or synced.
on a side note, the error message needs to be fixed to point to /etc/make.profile/make.defaults what happens if you `rm -rf /usr/portage/profiles ; emerge sync` ?
That seems to make emerge sync working again. Running it right now (takes a little time on that machine and connection).
perhaps the solution is to ignore such errors when trying to run `emerge sync` ...
Ignore it when emerge doesn't work at all? How? Anyway the sync process now works, and after doing a second sync it seems that everything works now. Solution was to wait for the servers to get fixed up (I think), delete /usr/portage/profiles and then wait some more :) Then emerge worked again.
your problem was that your make.defaults was corrupted somehow usually the best way to fix corruption in the portage tree is to `emerge sync` ... but if portage complains about some file that it's reading from the portage tree and refuses to sync, thats not helpful :) so what we would ignore is errors that occured while trying to `emerge sync` from reading files in the portage tree
Correct, emerge sync didn't work because emerge needed a file that was corrupted by emerge-ing (from an rsync server that corrupted it, right?) :)
Should this now be set to FIXED?
Fixed as best can be. Probably was a bad mirror.
