I ran emerge --sync (on 3/22/05) and was informed there was a new version of portage available. I emerged it and got this error: * checking 122 files for package collisions existing file /usr/lib/portage/bin/pemerge.py is not owned by this package * spent 0.231904983521 seconds checking for file collisions * This package is blocked because it wants to overwrite * files belonging to other packages (see messages above). * If you have no clue what this is all about report it * as a bug for this package on http://bugs.gentoo.org package sys-apps/portage-2.0.51.19 NOT merged I also got many errors stating that /var/tmp/portage/portage-2.0.51.19/<file> was installed with group portage, but I'm not worried about that. Here's the output of 'emerge --pretend --update portage': [ebuild U ] sys-apps/debianutils-2.13.1 [1.16.7-r4] [ebuild U ] sys-apps/portage-2.0.51.19 [2.0.51-r15] I moved the offending file to /tmp and re-emerged portage and it worked fine. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Emerge portage Actual Results: It failed to emerge Expected Results: It should have emerged
Something went wrong and portage no longer thought it had permissions to that file. I've seen this on my own machine after using the file checking tools in Disk Utility. If you are sure that the file should be owned by portage, it is safe to do 'FEATURES="-collision-protect" emerge package'.