Reference: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8024732.html Basically, the user currently has an outdated system, and is unable to update his portage version because setuptools depends on dev-python/certifi, which only has EAPI=6 versions available, which cannot be installed in the system's current state. I guess the easiest way to fix this is to keep an EAPI=5 version of any package that portage depends on directly in the tree.
Disable the xattr use flag.
This upgrade path was broken a while ago: https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-user/message/2da6c127f83c82a6bb897400970b9b4f It should have worked until at least November (a year after EAPI=6 portage was released), but, uh, someone messed up. It's now been about a year and a half, where it becomes hard to expect people to maintain backwards-compatibility. Fortunately, it's not too hard to fix. You can run portage directly from a `git clone`, and it won't care which version of the libraries you have. So if it works, you can use that to upgrade the libraries, and then proceed as normal. You could also use quickpkgs from another system, or from a stage3 tarball. There are a few other suggestions in that thread.
The upgrade path is not broken. You just have to disable an optional feature to proceed.
Or disable "python2_7" and "pypy" targets in PYTHON_TARGETS variable for sys-apps/portage. sys-apps/portage with USE="xattr" needs dev-python/pyxattr only for Python 2.*. Standard library of Python >=3.3 contains xattr support so dev-python/pyxattr is not needed with Python 3.
