On 2020-02-23 16:47, Rich Freeman wrote: > > emerge-webrsync has just eaten my /usr/portage :-( ;-( > >
> Offhand I'm not sure why it broke, but the gentoo repo is completely > disposable. When this sort of thing happens I generally just: > > cd /usr > mv portage portage-old > emerge-webrsync or emerge --sync It was 100% self inflicted. What I'd done to cause it was a bit stupid, but no document I know explicitly says "don't do this", so I think a follow up might be of some value. In a desperate act to satisfy the ever increasing build space requirements for firefox and its kin, I'd symlinked /var/tmp/portage to a subdirectory of /usr/portage. And webrsync does "rsync ... --delete ...", so now you see where this is going. Fortunately, as you say, the recovery was easy once I knew what went wrong. > You might consider moving the sync location out of /usr while you're > at it. Also, if you haven't already done so get > /usr/portage/distfiles outside of the repo directory. For new > installs both of these are moved to /var in non-nested directories, > but existing installs will continue to use their present locations. But I already have a bunch of symlinks to juggle the space requirements and I would rather not revisit that, right now. On my system /var is in the / filesystem and doesn't have that much space (less than the 8G necessary to build firefox). At some future spring cleaning time, maybe. Thanks for the help. -- Ian