I unmasked portage-2.2_pre4 to see if it would help with the extreme
slowness of portage updating of its cache during a sync. I had also
previously emerged cdb to try to help with that also. Anyway, I'm not
really sure what state my portage is in right now, except that now every
emerge command returns

festus@gentoovm ~ $ emerge --info
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/emerge", line 31, in ?
    import emergehelp, xpak, commands, errno, re, socket, string, time, types
  File "/usr/lib/portage/pym/emergehelp.py", line 7, in ?
    from portage_const import PRIVATE_PATH,PRELINK_BINARY,HASHING_BLOCKSIZE
  File "/usr/lib/portage/pym/portage_const.py", line 7, in ?
    from portage_const import PRIVATE_PATH,PRELINK_BINARY,HASHING_BLOCKSIZE
ImportError: cannot import name PRIVATE_PATH

I already tried
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/portage/doc/manually-fixing-portage.xml
but it didn't help. Me thinks I should have done a quickpkg!

Any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
festus