KEYWORDS

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

An example  setting: KEYWORDS="alpha amd64 arm arm64 hppa ia64 m68k ~mips ppc ppc64 s390 sh sparc x86 ~sparc-fbsd ~x86-fbsd"

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

Special keywords
In addition to the normal  portage supports three special tokens:

~* package is visible if it is in testing on any architecture
 * package is visible if it is stable on any architecture
 * package is always visible (KEYWORDS are ignored completely)

For detailed information see the portage manpage.

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 package the maintainer does not respond to an e-mail request in 30 days, the user can CC to arch testing teams him/herself.

For the basic guide on how developers stabilize ebuilds, 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.

You can check if a package needs a maintainer by one of the following methods:
 * Using equery meta  (equery is a utility provided ).
 * Viewing the  section found in
 * Viewing the list of maintainer-needed packages on the Gentoo site.