at: 11.a. User Administration we have: portage | be able to use emerge --pretend as a normal user So I just created a new fresh user to test it. test@willoughby ~ $ groups test test@willoughby ~ $ emerge -pv portage These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating dependencies... done! [ebuild R ] sys-apps/portage-2.2.8-r1 USE="(ipc) -build -doc -epydoc (-pypy2_0) -python2 -python3 (-selinux) -xattr" LINGUAS="-ru" PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7 (-pypy2_0) (-python2_6) -python3_2 -python3_3 (-python3_4)" 0 kB Total: 1 package (1 reinstall), Size of downloads: 0 kB I'm able to run emerge --pretend if I'm not in the portage group, so we have two possibilities: 1)The description is wrong and any user is able to run emerge --pretend 2)The description is right and emerge is bugged. In case of 2, please assign the bug to dev-portage@
I can't find a good source of when to use the portage group. On my system, write access to distfiles for instance is possible if you're in the portage group, but I don't know if that is default behavior (as my distfiles is on non-standard location with specific mount options and such, so could have been made by me personally). I've updated the text to be a more generic "be able to access portage restricted resources".
