Bug 2469 – Can't upgrrade portage to most recent version.

• Product: Portage Development
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description walt 2002-05-05 11:12:25 UTC]

Upgrading portage to 1.9.6 (as per current website instructions) fails:

#emerge --pretend /usr/portage/sys-apps/portage/portage-1.9.6.ebuild 

These are the packages that I would merge, in order.
Calculating dependencies \
!!! ebuild sys-apps/portage-1.9.6 not found (possibly blocked by package.mask)

NOTE:  I deliberately commented out this entry in package.mask:
#=sys-apps/portage-1.9.6_pre1  but got the failure anyway.
Also tried the .bz2 in the files subdirectory but that failed too.

There is a real ambiguity about what version of portage an ordinary user
should be running.  Currently I'm running 1.8.19 installed from the
'rescue' package because 1.8.8 broke after an 'emerge rsync' on May 02.

Question: how the fsck do I know what version of Gentoo I'm running?  I don't
know what to put at the top of this form for 'version'.

[Comment 1 walt 2002-05-05 12:08:52 UTC]

Clarification:  I didn't mention that I tried the conventional route first,
before specifying a version number:

 # emerge sys-apps/portage
Calculating dependencies   !!! Couldn't find match for sys-apps/portage; aborting.

There may be discrepancies between my /var/cache and /var/db trees because of
the emergency update from portage-1.8.8 >> 1.8.19.  I did need to add the 
directory /var/cache/edb by hand in order to get 1.8.19 to work at all, and
many packages installed under 1.8.8 are not yet listed in the /var/cache 
directory.

Is there some way to force my package database to be internally consistent
without re-installing the entire system?

[Comment 2 Daniel Robbins (RETIRED) 2002-05-05 23:41:30 UTC]

This is happening because your system was a Gentoo Linux 1.0 release candidate
and you did not follow the upgrade instructions to the "official" 1.0.  Do this:

cd /etc
rm make.profile
ln -s /usr/portage/profiles/default-1.0 make.profile

You should now be able to "see" the new versions of Portage.

[Comment 3 walt 2002-05-06 14:01:46 UTC]

Worked perfectly, thanks!  Where should I be looking
for such upgrade instructions in the future?

[Comment 4 Daniel Robbins (RETIRED) 2002-05-07 11:50:53 UTC]

The best thing to do is subscribe to our gentoo-announce mailing list.  It's
low-traffic and will contain major announcements like that.  Thanks for using
Gentoo Linux :)