Dark_MaGe wrote:ThinkBayon wrote:I was going to keep using Sabayon Business. Until half of the programs I wanted to install were blocked by Masks. Ah, I love my Debian DVD! Not trying to trash the distro by any means, but this is a problem that needs to be fixed for a distro that should be easy to use.
the fact that you don't know at all how portage works doesn't mean that everytime you try to upgrade something you trash the distro...you could simply change x86 into ~x86 in /etc/make.conf...but looks like you're more interested in complaining than in learning...and this is something I can happily say...keep your debian

it will work better for you since you have no idea of what learning means

...I still wonder.....really...

Sigh...such arrogance on such a beautiful island. Sorry, but I'm Sicilian too and I had to flaunt my familiarity :^)
I read through the Portage section of the Gentoo Handbook, and I was unable to find my answer to the problem. The Masked and Unmasked files looked like a muddled mess to me, and what really bothered me wasn't that I couldn't get something done, it was that this was based on settings I had never set. Almost like I was using Ubuntu!
Having control of my system is important, and I found this sort of restriction very unintuitive. The error message I received was very uninformative, to say the least. In addition, the packages I was trying to install could in no way harm my system. Geany is a lightweight GTK IDE designed to have few dependencies...how could that harm my system? Portage didn't even give me the option to override: the machine had taken over.
Maybe I'll give Sabayon another try just a little down the road...but for now I prefer distributions that give me complete control: Debian, Slackware, and Arch.