[gentoo-user] masked packages

[n952162]

Hello.

I'd like to emerge *radicale*, but see it's masked for amd, etc.  I
looked at the portage meta data and the ebuild to see if I could find
out why it should be masked - it's just a python program, supposedly. 
But I can't find out anything.  This warnings are unequivocal about
unmasking a package if you don't know why it's masked
(https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Knowledge_Base:Unmasking_a_package). Does
anybody have any ideas?

[Jack]

I'd like to emerge *radicale*, but see it's masked for amd, etc.  I
looked at the portage meta data and the ebuild to see if I could find
out why it should be masked - it's just a python program, supposedly. 
But I can't find out anything.  This warnings are unequivocal about
unmasking a package if you don't know why it's masked
(https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Knowledge_Base:Unmasking_a_package). Does
anybody have any ideas?

I see www-apps/radicale-3.1.8 marked as testing, but not masked. The
place to look for masking reasons is /usr/portage/profiles/package.mask
(or wherever your portage tree lives.)

However, if I search for radicale, I only see the one package, and the
associated acct-group and acct-user, so I don't know if you just used *
to quote the name, or if there are related packages I'm not seeing.

[n952162]

Hi,

How do you see that radicale is marked for testing?
[snip]
/      !!! All ebuilds that could satisfy "radicale" have been masked.//
//      !!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete
your request://
//      - www-apps/radicale-3.1.7::gentoo (masked by: ~amd64 keyword)//
//      - www-apps/radicale-3.1.5::gentoo (masked by: ~amd64 keyword)//
/

The ~amd64 keyword means www-apps/radicale is only available on
testing, otherwise the keyword would have been amd64 (without the
tilde). So portage is telling you it can’t install
www-apps/radicale-3.1.7 because it’s only available on testing, which
it does by saying it’s “masked by [the] ~amd64 keyword”.
That’s a different thing than masking a package using a package.mask
file, where the package is technically available for your architecture
but someone (usually you or the gentoo developpers) decided it wasn’t
fit to be installed: for instance the recent discovery of a backdoor
in xz-utils-5.4.6 led the gentoo developpers to mask this package, by
adding it to the /var/db/repos/gentoo/profiles/package.mask file which
you retrieved by syncing your gentoo tree.
Hoël

Thank you, very informative.

[Hoël Bézier]

Hi,

How do you see that radicale is marked for testing?
[snip]
/      !!! All ebuilds that could satisfy "radicale" have been masked.//
//      !!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete
your request://
//      - www-apps/radicale-3.1.7::gentoo (masked by: ~amd64 keyword)//
//      - www-apps/radicale-3.1.5::gentoo (masked by: ~amd64 keyword)//
/

The ~amd64 keyword means www-apps/radicale is only available on testing,
otherwise the keyword would have been amd64 (without the tilde). So portage is
telling you it can’t install www-apps/radicale-3.1.7 because it’s only
available on testing, which it does by saying it’s “masked by [the] ~amd64
keyword”.

That’s a different thing than masking a package using a package.mask file,
where the package is technically available for your architecture but someone
(usually you or the gentoo developpers) decided it wasn’t fit to be installed:
for instance the recent discovery of a backdoor in xz-utils-5.4.6 led the
gentoo developpers to mask this package, by adding it to the
/var/db/repos/gentoo/profiles/package.mask file which you retrieved by syncing
your gentoo tree.

Hoël

[Hoël Bézier]

Post by Hoël Bézier
That’s a different thing than masking a package using a package.mask file,
where the package is technically available for your architecture but someone
for instance the recent discovery of a backdoor in xz-utils-5.4.6 led the

xz-utils-5.6.0, my bad. See lines 46 to 60 of
/var/db/repos/gentoo/profiles/package.mask.

Post by Hoël Bézier
gentoo developpers to mask this package, by adding it to the
/var/db/repos/gentoo/profiles/package.mask file which you retrieved by syncing
your gentoo tree.

Hoël

[n952162]

I see www-apps/radicale-3.1.8 marked as testing, but not masked. The
place to look for masking reasons is
/usr/portage/profiles/package.mask (or wherever your portage tree lives.)
However, if I search for radicale, I only see the one package, and the
associated acct-group and acct-user, so I don't know if you just used
* to quote the name, or if there are related packages I'm not seeing.

Thank you.

How do you see that radicale is marked for testing?

I don't have /usr/portage/profiles/package.mask on my system, but I
found a second package.mask in

        /var/db/repos/gentoo/profiles/package.mask

but it doesn't mention radicale.

Are you saying that if a package is "masked", portage is only aware of
that fact because it's specified in a file on my system? But it's also
shown as "masked" here:

https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/www-apps/radicale.

The actual error mesg:

/      !!! All ebuilds that could satisfy "radicale" have been masked.//
//      !!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete
your request://
//      - www-apps/radicale-3.1.7::gentoo (masked by: ~amd64 keyword)//
//      - www-apps/radicale-3.1.5::gentoo (masked by: ~amd64 keyword)//
/

The asterisks were supplied by thunderbird (or something thereafter) to
implement the "Bold" font I specified.