Maybe you’ve found yourself trying to install a Gentoo package and you got something like this:
emerge -p portmon
These are the packages that I would merge, in order:Calculating dependencies
!!! all ebuilds that could satisfy “portmon” have been masked.!!! Error calculating dependencies. Please correct.
The reason is that certain packages are marked as masked meaning that the package will not be automatically upgraded or installed unless you take specific actions. Here goes some of them:
- Take a look at /usr/portage/profiles/package.mask to see if the package is there. If so, comment out the line that corresponds to the package. This method is somehow old-fashioned.
- Edit /etc/make.conf and declare ACCEPT_KEYWORDS in the ebuild file. This will accept unstable packages on your architecture (x86, ppc, sparc, etc…). By default, this is set to not accept unstable packages.
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~x86″
- ACCEPT_KEYWORDS could also be set on the command line:
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~x86″ emerge -p portmon
- Pass a full path to the package ebuild to emerge (Be carefull here as this method will bypass dependency checking):
emerge -p /usr/portage/net-analyzer/portmon/portmon-1.9.ebuild
There are other means for unmasking masked packages, but this is your homework for today 