[SOLVED] Killed portage, and am trying to revive it

[dachschaden]

Last sunday I have installed livestreamer for twtich.tv. Apparently I screwed up something, because every python script in /usr/bin has been replaced with the livestreamer startup script.

Annoying.

Which means that whenever I tried to "emerge" or "ebuild" something, it would just give me the error message that "livestreamer shouldn't be used in root mode, and please, please use --another-totally-unrelated-option to make it run as root".

So, since I couldn't update nor reinstall everything, I tried to repair portage. Hitting google, I found this page, got the tar archive from the server (version 2.2.18, mind you), unpacked it ... well, I basically did everything the page read. Then, I wanted to follow the recommendation to update portage as soon as possible to get a clean built.

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# emerge sys-apps/portage

What should I say, countless errors appeared with each repetition of this command. Most of the time it was because important scripts were missing in /usr/lib/portage/bin/, like ebuild-ipc and misc-functions.sh and what not.
Then there was a nasty problem because emerge suddenly did forget where dodoc and doins were located, and it wouldn't for the love of Stallman look into /usr/lib/potage/bin/ebuild-helpers for these two files (why? I have no earthly idea, and I don't care because) which I then just put into /usr/bin/.

Then there was a VERY nasty problem that the emerge process would die because it could not write a certain file to a certain location, because /var/tmp/portage/sys-apps/portage-2.2.14/image/usr/sbin/ did not exist. When I created it, it got deleted by the process again. Using

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# chattr +i /var/tmp/portage/sys-apps/portage-2.2.14/image/usr/sbin/

in hope to get at least a funny error message when it crashes because the directory couldn't be deleted turned out to be not satisfactory, as the directory simply becomes non-writable. I had to use an race-condition within emege (confirm the installation, let the directory be deleted and then create it in time) to FINALLY get it installed. Somewhat.

Because now when I try to install something ... like, for example, sys-apps/portage, I get this (un)funny error message:

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# emerge sys-apps/portage
usage: Usage: ebuild <ebuild file> <command> [command] ...
emerge: error: missing required args

Huh?

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# emerge --ask sys-apps/portage
ebuild: --ask: does not end with '.ebuild'

And now I am done with this crap, and I'll wait for someone eager and willing enough to help me.

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# which emerge
/usr/bin/emerge
# which ebuild
/usr/bin/ebuild

If you need any, any more information, just ask them right away.

[dol-sen]

There are already many threads here about using pip as root and trashing your system...

This thread is only a few down from this one.

[dachschaden]

Absolutely gorgeous - seemed to work like a charm.
And sorry about the thread. I searched google up and down and just couldn't imagine that there would be as stupid as me and do the very same thing in such a short period that google wouldn't have it in its cache.