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