Unmask packages in Gentoo

Let’s take a little break in the political ranting and go geeky. I’m using Gentoo Linux (Gentoo GNU/Linux for you FSF nutbags) and I tend to run some software marked unstable. To do this you have to unmask the packages you want to install. For some reason I could not get the autounmask package to work properly (It kept unmasking one package over and over again) and I got sick of manually entering each needed package into the unmask file.
Having too much time on my hands, I wrote a bash script that unmasks a package and all its dependencies. You call the script as:

./unmasker.sh =app-category/app-version

For example, to unmask kde 4.1.2 you run:

./unmasker.sh =kde-base/kdebase-meta-4.1.2

I’ve successully unmasked portage 2.2_rc12, Gnome 2.24.0 and KDE 4.1.2 with this script.

This script will not handle blocked packages or EAPI incompabilities. For examle with KDE 4.1.2 I had to unmask and install portage 2.2_rc12 first due to the ebuild requirering a portage with EAPI-2 support, and I also manually had to uninstall qt-4.3 since it was blocking qt-4.4.

Anyhew, give it a go if you want to try it out, and you’re welcome to give me suggestions on how to improve it.

Get script here