After recent discusion I tryed to move my installation around and set this in make.conf PORTROOT="/var/cache/portage" PORTDIR="${PORTROOT}/tree" now q* fails $ qgrep foo grep: chdir to PORTDIR '/tree' failed: No such file or directory
You have the powers to assign bugs. Please use them :)
this is by design. portage-utils does not track all variables, just the ones it cares about.
since PORTDIR is no longer supported (moving to repos.conf via bug 540620), i'm not going to spend time on this.