Paper Raincoat concert Saturday

Boston-area folks, Paper Raincoat, who I believe I mentioned a few months ago in the context of opening for Vienna Teng, and part of whom anybody who has heard Vienna Teng's new album has heard, is playing at Club Passim this Saturday at 8pm. Tickets are $14 plus fees.

shield_toad111 and I are going. If you'd like to join us, let me know and we can try to grab seats together.

Gentoo Maintainence

I just had an annoying amount of difficulty doing an emerge -avtuND world.

The reason? I'm an idiot.

Note to self, and other Gentoo users: Never add anything to /etc/portage/package.unmask; it will come back to bite you later.

This is a slight lie: it's appropriate to add games-roguelike/nethack for manual unmasking. But in general, if you think this is the correct solution to your problem, you're probably wrong; think two more times.

Also, I'll point out that running ~arch can be viral: trying to run the ~arch version of net-www/mozilla-firefox, for example, results in about a dozen packages having to be added to package.keywords. This is a giant pain in the ass.

Question: is there a tool which will helpfully add a package to package.keywords and helpfully recursively add dependencies as necessary until the package will be compiled? Doing it by hand is really tedious, especially because emerge will only tell you the first package which is going to cause a problem, not all of them, so you can't even get a list. Meh.

Sometimes Gentoo is a right PITA. Also, I'm worried that tuomov may be right about the direction Linux is going, though I can't believe he's right about the solution. I think what he's putting up with by switching to Windows is worse than what I'm putting up with by sticking to Linux, which I guess shows we have different priorities despite generally agreeing about what sucks.