Portage log

When using emerge for building a package, it is not uncommon to notice messages coming from Portage itself. Since they may contain important information from Gentoo developers it is a good idea to read them, but often this is not immediately possible because they rapidly scroll out of the screen. This can be easily solved by enabling a Portage feature called elog, whose purpose is to save messages to disk for later review.

elog should be enabled by editing

The first thing to do is to choose a directory for storing Portage log files. By default, Portage uses :

Then select which kind of information should be logged. Possible values are,  ,  ,   and  :

Now tell Portage how logs should be handled. They can be saved to the disk or mailed to some recipient, or both. For example, in order to only save the logs), enable the  module only:

For mailing logs to a recipient, enable the  module instead. The mail option requires some additional variables to be set. Read for further information.

External resources

 * Underestimated or underused: Portage (e)logging — (Sven Vermeulen's blog)