Re: [gentoo-user] layman: cannot properly execute...
>> 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
[gentoo-user] layman: cannot properly execute...
Hi, all, For some time I've been getting messages like: cannot properly execute /var/lib/layman/science/virtual/lapack/lapack-3.6-r100.ebuild for *every* package in the science overlay. This happened on 2 of 3 very similar gentoo systems I maintain, but not the third. As far as I could tell, the permissions and ownership of all /etc/portage and /usr/portage and /var/lib/layman files and directories are identical. All the machines have the same /etc/passwd and /etc/group files, the same /var/lib/portage/world files, and so on. I've gone to some effort to make these machines as identical as possible. I have done layman -d science then layman -a science to see if wiping out the overlay then reinstalling it would help, but that makes no difference. Googling the error produces just a few hits that recommend permissions and ownerships that helped solve this problem for others, but don't help me. It appears that this error message comes from /usr/bin/eix. I've looked through the source code a bit, but it's been long enough since I've messed with C that this didn't yield any answers. strace indicates that eix does an lstat on every element of /var/lib/layman/science/virtual/lapack/lapack-3.6-r100.ebuild before deciding to print the error message. It also indicates that eix does a setuid and setgid to portage:portage early in its execution. As far as I can tell, portage:portage ought to be able to both read and execute this ebuild (and all the other ones eix complains about). And now, out of the blue apparently, the third system has started spitting out this error message as well. Any ideas on how to debug this? John Blinka
