KEYWORDS

Keywords
In an ebuild the KEYWORDS variable informs in which architectures the ebuild is stable or still in testing phase.

The following example contains some possible values for the KEYWORDS variable:

The prefix  (a tilde character) placed in front of various architectures in the above example above means that architecture is in a "testing phase" and is not ready for production usage.

Special keywords
In addition to the normal KEYWORDS values Portage supports three special tokens:


 * - Package is visible if it is stable on any architecture.
 * - Package is visible if it is in testing on any architecture.
 * - Package is always visible ( KEYWORDS are ignored completely).

If you encounter the  KEYWORD, this indicates that the package is known to be broken on all systems which are not otherwise listed in KEYWORDS. For example, a binary only package which is built for x86 will look like:

If you wish to accept this package anyways, then use one of the other keywords in your package.accept_keywords like this:

For detailed information see the Portage man page.

Stabilization requests
(Thanks to this blog post by Scarabeus = Tomáš Chvátal.)

Users can file stabilization requests in the Gentoo Bugzilla for packages in testing, i.e. those with the  flag. If the package maintainer does not respond to an e-mail request in 30 days, the user can CC to arch testing teams them self.

For the basic guide explaining the ebuild stabilization process see the Arch testing guide article.

Maintainer-needed packages
If a package lacks a maintainer check the bug page to see if the package is crash-free or has available patches.

Check if a package needs a maintainer by one of the following methods:


 * Using ( is a utility provided ).
 * Viewing the  section found in
 * Viewing the list of maintainer-needed packages on the Gentoo QA reports site.

External resources

 * Gentoo Development Guide: Keywording