recover-portage-vdb

About

In some cases, Portage's internal database (VDB) can become corrupted.

This tool covers cases where ELF metadata (e.g. NEEDED, PROVIDES, REQUIRES) is malformed/missing.

More detail is provided on the Gentoo wiki.

Tools

This project provides two external tools:

1. recover-broken-vdb-find-broken.sh - to find broken packages (detection)
2. recover-broken-vdb - to fix the VDB (mitigation/fix)

Usage

Check for broken packages

Run the scan tool:

$ recover-broken-vdb-find-broken.sh | tee broken_vdb_packages

If there's no output, you're done!

Backup database

$ cp -r /var/db/pkg /var/db/pkg.orig

Repair database

First, run the tool in pretend mode (outputs to a temporary directory by default):

$ recover-broken-vdb

If the output looks correct, run the tool again to make changes to the live database (or merge the temporary directory with it yourself):

$ recover-broken-vdb --output /var/db/pkg

Rebuild affected packages

$ emerge --ask --verbose --oneshot ">=app-misc/pax-utils-1.3.3"
$ emerge --ask --verbose --oneshot --usepkg=n $(cat broken_vdb_packages)