Yesterday, I somehow broke portage. I followed the steps in /usr/portage/sys-apps/portage/files/README.RESCUE and installed the most recent tarball for my x86 system. However, for architectures other than amd64, the most recent tarball is <2.0.51, which introduced support for stacked profiles. So, I first had to downgrade the used profile by setting the /etc/make.profile symlink back to an older version which does not use stacked profiles, install a recent portage version and then upgrade again. It would be nicer if a user could just get a more recent version that supports stacked profiles out of the box. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. cd / 2. wget http://dev.gentoo.org/~carpaski/portage_rescue/portage-rescue-2.0.50-r1-x86.tbz2 3. tar xpvjf portage-rescue-2.0.50-r1-x86.tbz2 4. emerge portage Actual Results: !!! 'str' object has no attribute 'insert' !!! 'rm -Rf /usr/portage/profiles; emerge sync' may fix this. If it does !!! not then please report this to bugs.gentoo.org and, if possible, a dev !!! on #gentoo (irc.freenode.org) Gentoo Base System version 1.4.16 Portage 2.0.51-r3 (default-linux/x86/2004.3, gcc-3.3.4, glibc-2.3.4.20040808-r1, 2.6.9-gentoo-r4 i686) ================================================================= System uname: 2.6.9-gentoo-r4 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) Processor distcc 2.13 i686-pc-linux-gnu (protocols 1 and 2) (default port 3632) [disabled] Autoconf: sys-devel/autoconf-2.59-r5 Automake: sys-devel/automake-1.8.5-r1 Binutils: sys-devel/binutils-2.14.90.0.8-r1 Headers: sys-kernel/linux-headers-2.4.19-r1,sys-kernel/linux-headers-2.4.21-r1 Libtools: sys-devel/libtool-1.5.2-r5 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CFLAGS="-march=athlon -O2 -mmmx -m3dnow -pipe" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" COMPILER="" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/lib/mozilla/defaults/pref /usr/share/config /usr/share/texmf/dvipdfm/config/ /usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/platex/config/ /usr/share/texmf/xdvi/ /var/qmail/control" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/terminfo /etc/env.d" CXXFLAGS="-march=athlon -O2 -mmmx -m3dnow -pipe" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoaddcvs autoconfig ccache distlocks maketest sandbox sfperms userpriv usersandbox" GENTOO_MIRRORS="ftp://gentoo.inode.at/source/ http://mirrors.sec.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/gentoo ftp://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/mirrors/gentoo" MAKEOPTS="-j2" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage" SYNC="rsync://rsync.europe.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="3dnow X Xaw3d aalib alsa apm avi berkdb bidi bitmap-fonts bonobo canna cdr cjk crypt cscope cups dga doc dvd encode esd f77 fam flac foomaticdb fortran gdbm gif gnome gpm gtk gtk2 gtkhtml guile imagemagick imlib ipv6 jack java jpeg junit kerberos krb4 libg++ libwww lirc mad maildir matrox mbox mikmod mmx motif mozilla moznocompose moznoirc moznomail mpeg ncurses network nls nogcj oggvorbis opengl oss pam pda pdflib perl png python quicktime readline ruby samba scanner sdl slang spell ssl svga tcltk tcpd tiff truetype vim-with-x x86 xml xml2 xmms xv zlib"
this is kind of fixed: $ cat README.RESCUE Please see http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/portage/doc/manually-fixing-portage.xml for a recovery guide for a broken portage installation. And that guide doesn't tell you to download a rescue-tarball but the normal one.