Re: [gentoo-user] "masked by: EAPI 7" trying up update "portage" - how to proceed

[Jack <ostroffjh@users.sourceforge.net>]

On 2020.06.11 18:05, n952162 wrote:
> On 2020-06-11 23:59, Jack wrote:
>> On 2020.06.11 17:22, n952162 wrote:
>>> On 2020-06-11 23:10, n952162 wrote:
>>>> On 2020-06-11 23:05, Jack wrote:
>>>>> It would really help if you get rid of lots of extraneous  
>>>>> messages in the emerge output by reading all the new news items  
>>>>> (even if you already read them elsewhere) and finish updating  
>>>>> your config files (or deleting the update files if you already  
>>>>> updated the actual config files.)  The more you can get emerge to  
>>>>> stop saying, the easier it is to read what it does say.
>>>> 
>>>> Okay, I'll give it a try ... actually, I did, back then.  I'm not  
>>>> sure why it didn't get marked as read.
>>>> 
>>>> But I'm really working blind on this machine.  I can't see what I  
>>>> type (which is one of the reasons I'm trying to update) -  
>>>> Furthermore, it's in a VM and I don't have X up so I have to put  
>>>> everything in a file and scp it around.
>> Ah, that does make things difficult.  I assume you don't have sshd  
>> running on that VM.  Being able to ssh in to a VM is often very  
>> helpful, but you need to have set it up before you have problems.  
>> Actually - if you can scp into the VM, you should be able to ssh.  
>> Can you?  If you, you should be able to do all the edit and emerges  
>> that way.
> 
> That's a great idea that I didn't think of, but the problem is, I'm  
> set up for NAT and as far as I know, you can't ssh in that case ...  
> maybe I could set up some kind of port-forwarding situation, or  
> change my networking type ... I'm not sure which is easiest....   I  
> hadn't expected that this was going to get this complicated  ;-))))
If you can scp you can ssh (or are you running scp from inside the  
VM?)  If so, but sshd is running in the VM, then the trick is to find  
the right IP address to use to reach the VM.  If you ssh from the VM to  
your working PC, then you should be able to see the IP address it is  
coming from.  As long as it's the VM doing the NAT and the connection  
is not going through a separate router, you should be OK.  The other  
way is to look at the list of connected devices on the router.  You  
should be able to identify the VM and thus the IP address it is using.   
I would try a bit more on this ssh approach, but if it doesn't work  
fairly quickly, I would leave it alone and continue to concentrate on  
portage, and then upgrading the rest of the system, per Rich's  
suggestions.
>>>> 
>>>> But I'll try to get those things cleared up.
>>> 
>>> Ah, now I see:
>>> 
>>> !!! Error: cannot update list of news items for repository "gentoo"
>> Yes indeed, that's very odd.  What command is that in response to?   
>> I would expect "emerge --sync" to update that, but I probably would  
>> not try that until you get portage straightened out.
> 
> That was just after letting "eselect news read" run through.
That sounds like a permission problem, which may end up having an  
effect on your other efforts.  In my case, it is  
/usr/portage/metadata/news, and everything there is root:root and the  
actual news items are all 755.  You could also try doing the "eselect  
news read new" as root.