>> Any ideas on how to debug this? > > First of all, update all affected parties to the latest versions > (eix, portage, layman).
Did that. I'm always up to date. > > Second, use divide and conqueror strategy. If this is the eix > problem, isolate it to eix only without invoking layman (or emaint > sync -a or what on the earth you were doing?!). I use eix-sync, so I believe this is a problem with eix rather than any ancillary software. > > Try with eix-update. If problem persists, look for what eix cache > method you are using: see man eix for the list, there are many of > them. Since you have exec error, it likely is ebuild, try to change > it to parse or metadata. > eix-update gives the same error messages as eix-sync. I've tried reading the eix man page, and have to admit that I don't understand what the various cache methods mean. I did try both "eix-update -m science parse" and "eix-update -m science metadata" without solving the problem (and without me understanding precisely how these commands change the situation). FWIW, eix --dump gives # STRING # Portage cache-backend that should be used for the overlays. # (metadata[:*]/sqlite/flat[:*]/portage-2.1/parse[*][|]ebuild[*]/eix[*][:*]) OVERLAY_CACHE_METHOD="parse|ebuild*" In my installations, I note that there's a /usr/portage/metadata/md5-cache directory, but no /var/lib/layman/science/metadata cache directories. Is something missing? Is there some place other than the eix man page that describes these various kinds of caches? Thanks for your suggestions, John
