At long last, Gentoo 2008.0 is out. Yeah, I know. If you already have Gentoo installed, who cares about a new release? Releases are good for the distribution as a whole. It stirs interest from people who haven’t tried Gentoo and also inspires articles on websites and magazines.
Anyway… I decided to switch to the 2008.0 profile. Usually, I just delete the /etc/make.profile symlink and create a new one to the latest and greatest profile. This time I figured I would give eselect a try. It changed the symlink fine, but I got the following error when trying to use emerge:
!!! Unable to parse profile: '/etc/make.profile'
!!! ParseError: Parent '/usr/portage/profiles/releases/2008.0' not found: '/usr/portage/profiles/default/linux/amd64/2008.0/parent'.
So, I deleted the symlink it created and did it manually. Got the same error. It turns out, some rsync servers either don’t have or aren’t propagating the new /usr/portage/profiles/releases directory. After doing another emerge –sync, it created the releases directory for me and I was good to go. :)