I've been using Gentoo for some time now. But I realise when I meet up with an ebuild error, the only thing I know to do is post it on a forum.

What should I look to, to be able to fix the problems myself?

Hi, first, you check with google if someone has the error.

Also, you can go to http://bugs.gentoo.org/ and search for the name of the package that is crashing.

50% of the time, you can solve the problem with google and the bugzilla site and for the rest, you ask for help and that's pretty fine, because I'm sure that a lot of people can have the same problem as your.

Also you can check the irc. Anther possible choice is to install one version back.

The first thing if you want to solve it yourself is to be able to read and understand the output.

When an ebuild fails there are at least two parts that you must be able to separate. Those are the compiler output and the portage one. It's very important to read the messages and identify where the error comes from. Once done that, then it just takes time and experience to be able to identify the ultimate cause of the problem. But sometimes it can get really tricky.

The statements above about learning how to read the output and to search bugs.gentoo.org and Google will help you fix many problems. Also, the revdep-rebuild utility helps when a new revision of something requires rebuilding dependencies (part of the gentoolkit package). If you're stuck after that, you'll probably need to ask.

Here's an example. I was putting off updates because I was too busy to do much more than check my email and some of the updates were going from tetex to texlive and a new pcre version. The tetex to texlive upgrade requires rebuilding programs like kile and pcre is just a dependency that happened to have a newer version available.

Most of that make stuff isn't relevant (for this purpose anyway). What we care about is the libtool line. A quick Google search for "cannot find the library" libpcreposix.la (the bold part, quotes included) would probably get you helpful results. However, the output from emerge (Portage messages, not build messages) after the pcre update says pcre no longer installs .la files and to install dev-util/lafilefixer and run it with the --justfixit argument.


In other cases Portage messages will say something useful like a USE flag should be enabled or disabled. The Portage output will have asterisks to the left of the messages. There can be other cases as well, but this is common stuff. I like to send the output from emerge -uvp to a file before an update so I have a reference of what was updated and what versions were involved.