Upgrading Gentoo 2007.0 to 10.0

So I left all these servers running gentoo a couple years ago. Now, after all this time (and uptime!), I want to install something.

Error:

emerge -av portage

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies |
!!! All ebuilds that could satisfy ">=dev-lang/python-2.5" have been masked.
!!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request:
- dev-lang/python-2.5.4-r3 (masked by: required EAPI -1, supported EAPI 0)
- dev-lang/python-2.6.2-r1 (masked by: required EAPI -2, supported EAPI 0)
- dev-lang/python-2.6.2-r2 (masked by: required EAPI -2, supported EAPI 0)
- dev-lang/python-2.6.4 (masked by: required EAPI -2, supported EAPI 0)
- dev-lang/python-3.1.1-r1 (masked by: required EAPI -2, supported EAPI 0)
- dev-lang/python-2.6.3 (masked by: required EAPI -2, supported EAPI 0)

For more information, see MASKED PACKAGES section in the emerge man page or 
refer to the Gentoo Handbook.
(dependency required by "sys-apps/portage-2.1.6.13" [ebuild])

Hm. Yeah, I’m way out of date.

Solution: I found other sites that talked about forcing a python/portage install but I that sounded a little harsh. Instead, I found a snapshot of portage-2008.0 and replaced my /usr/portage with the contents of that.

 cd /usr
 rm -rf portage # or mv portage xxx
 wget http://gentoo.mirrors.tds.net/gentoo/releases/snapshots/2008.0/portage-2008.0.tar.bz2
 tar -xjpf portage-2008.0.tar.bz2
 cd /etc/
 rm make.profile
 ln -s /usr/portage/profiles/default/linux/x86/2008.0 make.profile
 emerge -av portage

That took me to portage-2.1.4.4.

From there, I can now go back to current 10.0 portage and emerge -av portage to get up to the current portage state.

Yeah, I really didn’t want to do a re-install.