How to get useful backtraces almost for free?

It's not as widely known as I would like, but FEATURES="splitdebug" in /etc/make.conf is a really useful setting. It does not make programs slower, but keeps the debugging info in case you need to report a bug. It's especially useful for packages which take long time to compile, or which use a lot of system libraries.

To save your time recompiling software when someone asks for better backtrace in a bug report, I encourage you to read Gentoo backtrace guide and apply it. Even splitdebug alone will give you noticeable advantage when something crashes. If you don't want to recompile the entire world after that, it's not needed. Over time more and more packages will get recompiled with splitdebug.

How Chromium ebuilds are masked

As you have probably noticed, www-client/chromium ebuilds are masked in an interesting way. After the latest beta channel release the situation is finally clear. If you want to be on the dev channel, you have to hard unmask the package. If you want to be on the beta channel, just ~keyword unmask it. There are no stable releases yet. For more information please refer to http://dev.gentoo.org/~phajdan.jr/ and http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/.