KEYWORDS

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

Examples

The following example contains some possible values for the KEYWORDS variable:

FILE example.ebuild

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

See the /usr/portage/profiles/arch.list for a list of keywords.

The prefix ~ (a tilde character) 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.

Special keywords

In addition to the normal KEYWORDS values Portage supports three special tokens:

• * - Package is visible if it is stable on any architecture.
• ~* - Package is visible if it is in testing on any architecture.
• ** - Package is always visible (KEYWORDS are ignored completely).

If you encounter the -* KEYWORD, this indicates that the package is known to be broken on all systems which are not otherwise listed in KEYWORDS. For example, a binary only package which is built for the x86 will look like:

root #equery meta fdftk

 * app-text/fdftk [gentoo]
Maintainer:  robbat2@gentoo.org
Maintainer:  tex@gentoo.org (Gentoo TeX Project)
Upstream:    None specified
Homepage:    http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/fdftoolkit.html
Location:    /var/portage/repos/gentoo/app-text/fdftk
Keywords:    6.0-r1:0: x86 -*
License:     Adobe

If you wish to accept this package anyways, then use one of the other keywords in the package.accept_keywords like this:

FILE /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords

app-text/fdftk amd64

For detailed information see the portage(5) man page.

See also

• Stable request — the procedure for moving an ebuild from testing to stable.
• Package testing — provides information for ebuild developers on testing ebuilds.

External resources

• Gentoo Development Guide: Keywording