When installing eix for the first time, a directory /var/cache/eix is created with ownership portage:portage. Directory creation and permission setting is achieved during pkg_postinst.

To begin using eix, the user must first run eix-update. This creates a fresh database file for eix, saved within /var/cache/eix.

The eix-0.32.1-r1 ebuild has a different directory creation routine under pkg_postinst. This results in /var/cache/eix being created with root:root ownership. The consequence of this is that the first run of eix-update fails, since eix cannot write the database file(s) into /var/cache/eix.

cannot open database file /var/cache/eix-portage.eix for writing (mode = 'wb')

A workaround is to manually change the ownership of this folder.

 chown portage:portage /var/cache/eix