[gentoo-user] Machine completely broken; Ncursed!

[Alan Grimes <ALONZOTG@verizon.net>]

My machine is so completely broken right now I can't open any new
terminal sessions.

This is because I stupidly tried to toggle tinfo useflag in a desperate
attempt to get everything in my portage tree working again.

Why now did nothing in my portage tree build?

It wasn't building for two reasons:

1. My machine is not correctly configured to build 32 bit executables,
mainly because I cannot find a 32 bit version of ncurses that ld is
willing to acknowledge the existence of.

2. LD cannot find ncurses, -- It simply can't, in 64 bit mode either.
That is the only error message it ever gives and vast amount of effort
spent in sessions over the last year and a half have failed to find any
solution. I only installed Gentoo on this machine four and a half years
ago so it's hard to imagine what could have gotten this royally foobar
in such a short period.


I am an enthuseastic supporter of multilib, I even tried to set it up
myself but failed due, once again, to ncurses.

I was running my system as usual, running updates every week or two, no
major issues since the libav clusterfuck a few months ago. (Libav is a
cult not a software project). The ncurses problem has been a low-level
issue for a long time but, with tinfo set, 99% of packages worked.

And then portage did two things.

1. It masked emul-linux -- A move that I support, it's time to see that go.

2. It sent out a profile that sets variable ABI_x86 with 32 bit enabled.
ALARM: ABI_x86 should be set in exactly one place:
/etc/portage/make.conf and nowhere else. But, nevertheless, ABI_x86 WAS
set which broke the profile because my system cannot compile 32 bit
executables. =( I tried the no-multilib profile but it didn't have a
number of essential useflags and was foobar.


Right now my system is completely unusable and will need fresh stage3
packages followed by an emerge emptytree to recover. But before I can do
that, I need a sane profile and to know that the person who pushed out
the changes to portage, obviously without any testing whatsoever, that
broke my system so comprehensively is tortured, executed, butchered, and
then cremated.


-- 
IQ is a measure of how stupid you feel.

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