Gentoo: how to install binutils from binary package (because I accidentally deleted it)

Question

I accidentally deleted my binutils and tried to install it as a binary package.

However, emerge is always complaining that there is no package by that name.

I downloaded the packages from here and simply copied it into /usr/portage/packages (and later also in distfiles).

After that I did chown portage:portage and tried to install the package:

sudo emerge --ask --usepkgonly binutils-2.24-r3.tbz2 

it tells me to adjust PKGDIR, but it is already set to /usr/portage/packages.

After that I tried this:

sudo emerge --ask --usepkgonly =binutils-2.24-r3

which tells me:

emerge: there are no binary packages to satisfy "=binutils-2.24-r3".

I don't know where my mistake is; it's written correctly and has the right permissions and is in the right location.... (make.conf locations are all default).

The last post on this Stack Overflow question didn't help either.

I just found what appears to be a solution: Fatal mistake: Uninstalled sys-devel/binutils - emerge don't work anymore (didn't see it before); however, it doesn't try to solve the problem using binary packages, so it doesn't answer this question

Answer 1

Probably, portage fails some internal magic because of some missing utilities from binutils. You can just unpack binary package in your root partition with tar -xjf /usr/portage/packages/binutils*bz2 -C /. Then you can try to reemerge binutils.

Also, are you sure that binpackage you've dowloaded is really tbz2, but not, say, html?

Answer 2

You need to remove the information about the package from the Packages file, everything from BUILD_TIME to REPO.

Then you can do something like: emerge --usepkg =media-gfx/graphite2-1.3.13 and it will work.

Answer 3

It's because /usr/portage/packages needs the category as well. The binary package should be placed in a subdirectory called sys-devel in packages.