Knowledge Base:Accepting a keyword for all packages

Synopsis
Developers or end users might want to use the latest available packages for their entire system, regardless if these packages are already considered production-ready or not. This will result in a system that has more recent software on it, but also receives a much higher update cycle and has a higher risk of system malfunction due to bugs.

Environment
Any Gentoo environment

Analysis
By default, Portage will only consider ebuilds whose KEYWORDS variable contains the users' architecture (without a  prefix). However, many ebuilds do have a later version for the same architecture, but these versions are not considered production-ready yet or have dependencies that are not production-ready yet. In these cases, the ebuild KEYWORDS variable will contain the architecture with a  prefix, like so: KEYWORDS="alpha amd64 arm ~sparc x86" KEYWORDS="~alpha ~amd64 ~arm ~sparc ~x86"
 * 1) Example of an ebuilds' KEYWORDS setting for a production-ready usage on amd64/x86 architecture
 * 1) Example of an ebuilds' KEYWORDS setting for non-production ready usage on amd64/x86 architect

As you can see, this prefix can be used on a per-architecture basis (the examples above refer to the prefix on amd64 and x86).

Resolution
To allow the package manager to install testing ebuilds, add the prefixed architecture to the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS setting in /etc/portage/make.conf:

By default, this variable will not be declared in /etc/portage/make.conf so you will need to add it yourself.