portage - ssh - masked how can i unmask it?

[variant]

the topic says it all really. I couldnt seem to ssh to my network with my gentoo box it gave some errors like: keys file not found or something.. and i couldnt run sshd so i unmerged the pre-built package with a view to emergeing the src... but it says its masked! I had a look in the package.mask file but could not find ssh listed. I feel that I am doing something badly wrong heer.. please help!

[lordnothing]

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge -vp ssh

try that.. (take out -vp if you want to actually install it :P)

[variant]

thanks it seems to be emerging:) but why does

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86"

make it work? I am new to gentoo and have only used suse before that - I have plenty to learn

[Dillinger]

KEYWORDS is used to mask or unmask packages based on their flag, therefore ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" tells portage to unmask and emerge the x86 package of whatever you want to install. You can set in the make.conf to do that to always install mask packages but I don't recommend it, I broke my system doing that

[Slip]

x86 means stable, ~x86 means new releases that are not yet stable (beta, alpha, etc..).

[variant]

thanks!