i've had more than one person ask me about this, so adding a single message explaining what ebuild is doing would help basically, in a repo where you have thin-manifests turned on, a Manifest file is not created when SRC_URI is empty. so if you go in to say a virtual dir and do: $ ebuild editor-0.ebuild manifest Appending /usr/local/src/chromiumos/src/third_party/portage-stable to PORTDIR_OVERLAY... >>> Creating Manifest for /usr/local/src/chromiumos/src/third_party/portage-stable/virtual/editor $ ls -l Manifest ls: cannot access Manifest: No such file or directory that's pretty confusing
