MythTV won't recompile: how to proceed?

[jamtat]

[danomac]

[jamtat]

Thanks for those great instructions for recompiling the kernel, danomac. Not too wild about doing that since the current kernel's been working well for me since I set up this system. But doing as you've suggested does seem the sensible way to proceed.

One thing I wanted to ask about is the r1 ending of the recommended kernel. Does that mean it's a release candidate or something?

Finally, I'm not quite certain I understand how to protect the kernel sources, i.e., how to ensure that they do not get removed from the system in the future. If, after downloading the sources and recompiling the kernel, I will run the command emerge --noreplace sys-kernel/gentoo-sources:3.18.25-r1, are there yet further steps I will be needing to take in order to ensure that the sources do not get removed? Like, by carefully examining the output of emerge --depclean (or emerge -p --depclean) and confirming that the kernel sources are excluded? If I will be needing to do the latter, then what will have been the point of running the emerge --noreplace sys-kernel/gentoo-sources:3.18.25-r1 command?

[danomac]

[jamtat]

It might seem pretty lame for a Gentoo user to admit but, being truthful, I must confess that only today did I finally succeed in compiling a new kernel for the Gentoo system I installed about a year and a half ago. I'll describe in a separate post problems I encountered and what I did to resolve them, but first I need to ask about a "kernel pinning" (I think that's Ubuntu-speak) technique I ran across in an old Gentoo forum posting and ask whether the directives are still valid.

At https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-33534.html it is stated that the way to cause a certain kernel version to remain on the system and, equally importantly to me, to prevent new kernel sources from being pulled in, is to add something like >sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-2.6.11 (in my case, probably more like gentoo-sources-3.18.25-r1) to /etc/portage/package.mask. So, are those 11-year-old directives still valid?

LATER EDIT: decided to do some preliminary analysis on introducing the package.mask change and discovered something I'd run across previously on this Gentoo system--namely the documentation's (shared by the author of the old post I referenced) assumption that package.mask is a file. On my system the referenced item is a directory (with a few files under it already), not a file. The package masking directives at the https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Knowledge_Base:Masking_a_package wiki page offer the example echo ">x11-drivers/ati-drivers-12.6_beta_pre897" >> /etc/portage/package.mask, a command that will not work on a system like mine, which will expect a file name at the end of that command rather than a directory name. And that situation, in turn, raises the question of, if the line specified is to go in a file under that directory, how is that file to be named? This is a fundamental unclarity I've encountered already more than once under Gentoo.

[danomac]

As per my previous post in this thread, if you want to protect 3.18.25-r1: