[gentoo-dev] emerge broken

[<lang@tharin.com>]

OK, no one has been able to offer a solution to my problem with emerge
erroring out with:

>>> Merging sys-apps/portage-1.9.13 to /
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/emerge", line 1242, in ?
    mydepgraph.merge(mydepgraph.altlist())
  File "/usr/bin/emerge", line 619, in merge
    retval=portage.doebuild(y,"merge",myroot,edebug)
  File
"/var/tmp/portage/portage-1.9.13/image//usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/portage.py",line 1102, in doebuild
    return
merge(settings["CATEGORY"],settings["PF"],settings["D"],settings["BUILDDIR"]+"/build-info",myroot,myebuild=settings["EBUILD"])  File
"/var/tmp/portage/portage-1.9.13/image//usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/portage.py",line 1354, in merge
    mylink.merge(pkgloc,infloc,myroot,myebuild)
  File
"/var/tmp/portage/portage-1.9.13/image//usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/portage.py",line 3180, in merge
    self.treewalk(mergeroot,myroot,inforoot,myebuild)
  File
"/var/tmp/portage/portage-1.9.13/image//usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/portage.py",line 2858, in treewalk
    packagecounter=long(globalcounterfile.readline())
ValueError: invalid literal for long():


With any package I try to emerge. I really don't want to reinstall, just
don't have a lot of time. Does anyone know offhand if untarring the stage3
tarball over my current / directory will do evil things to my system? It's
just a shot in the dark, but I'm thinking it might get things in working
order, then re emerge the handfull of apps that I use. Any comments on this
plan?