If I run layman -L not as root I get a list of error messages. The reason is that layman needs the right to write to /usr/local/portage/layman in order to update the cache. In my opinion, if run as a regular user, layman -L should catch this error and only print an adequate short warning (instead of five lines of errors). The output is as follows: * Failed to update the overlay list from: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/overlays/layman-global.txt * Error was: * Failed to temporarily cache overlays list in /usr/local/portage/layman/cache_65bd38402ac8431067b54904bd2ed2d1.xml * Error was: * [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/usr/local/portage/layman/cache_65bd38402ac8431067b54904bd2ed2d1.xml'
Fix in Git repo, patch by Bjoern Tropf: http://layman.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=layman/layman;a=commitdiff;h=a977b9542d18da2cde5ce03cb75e403c6630f5e2 You can emerge =app-portage/layman-9999 to give it a spin.