Portage log

When using  for building a package, it is not uncommon to notice messages coming from Portage itself. Since they may contain important informations from Gentoo developers it's 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 if you enable a Portage feature called elog, whose purpose is to save messages to disk for a 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 you should select which kind of informations should be logged. Possible values are,  ,  ,   and  :

Now you should tell Portage how log should be handled. You can either save them to disk or mail them to some recipient, or both. If you just want to save them, you should enable the  module only:

For mailing logs to some recipient, you should enable the  module instead, and set some additional variables, too. Please read for details.

External resources

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