All root accounts on machines I administer have a umask of 0077 set via /root/.bashrc. That leads to problems with layman, as all newly created files of repositories checked-out by layman are not readable by the portage user. I have written a wrapper script I am using from cron to run "layman -S" on a daily basis that sets a safe umask of 0022 before running layman. So far, so good. Unfortunately sometimes I need to run "layman -S" by hand and I *always* (yes) forget to use my wrapper script instead or to set a proper umask by hand prior to running layman, so I run into this permission problem. The IMHO best solution would be a simple feature allowing to set the umask in layman.cfg, with 0022 as the safe default.
Ping :)
I would even go further and say that it should always work with umask 0022. All other settings just break normal usage.
Finally in CVS (layman-1.2.0). Sorry for the delay.