I just did a fresh install of Gentoo over the last day or so. After emerging mirrorselect and all the other necessary ebuilds, if I run: mirrorselect -i my make.conf file becomes corrupted in the area near the "gentoo_mirrors" value. This happens every time I run mirrorselect. I've tried re-emerging it but that didn't fix the problem. I'm using the following: mirrorselect-0.2-r1.ebuild netselect-0.3.ebuild If there are any other packages you need me to give you info on, just let me know. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.mirrorselect -i 2.watch program crash out 3.nano -w /etc/make.conf 4.check near the gentoo_mirrors value and see the corruption Actual Results: my make.conf file was corrupted and mirrorselect no longer functioned (at least correctly). Expected Results: mirrorselect should have auto-configured my closest mirrors. If needed I will paste this as soon as I emerge my KDE and X desktop. Let me know if this is necessary.
if you culd post your make.conf before and after it woud be helpful, I can't recreate this here :(
Absolutely, give me a few hours and I'll have a working KDE install to do that with. I'll try and paste it up here before I leave in the morning. Latest I'll have it up in the afternoon. Basically, it looks like I'm getting garbage control sequences ( ^H[E]^A[[]D[H[B this type of thing, but not these patterns ) insterted in the few lines before and many lines after the gentoo_mirrors value. I'll provide the actual files ASAP.
I didn't forget about posting the file, I'm still emerging KDE. You're first on my list of things to do once I get a useable system...shouldn't be long now. :)
It seems as though after emerging all my programs (XFree 4.3, OpenOffice, KDE, mozilla, evolution, gaim...etc), the problem has disappeared. If I run into it again, I will be sure to let you know. Sorry for the alarm!
ok, thanks though :) Closing this one
I encountered the same problem this weekend, after an install of 1.4rc3 livecd with stage3. After emerge sync and installing a bunch of software, I can't reproduce it either. The corruption looked like screen updates: terminal control codes and dialog data. mirrorselect does "dialog ... 2>&1 |", which concerns me a bit, as dialog(1) says that "curses normally writes screen updates to the standard output", and ncurses(3x) says "If standard output from a ncurses program is re-directed to something which is not a tty, screen updates will be directed to standard error.". If mirrorselect sends both fd 1 and 2 to the one pipe, do you end up with screen updates in your output, and eventually in make.conf? I also saw some grep errors fly by before dialog took over the screen. I tried reproducing it from the console (rather than X-windows), and also tried by booting the cdrom and running mirrorselect from the mounted hard drive. That worked fine. Perhaps it's something particular to the install process. I'll try doing a complete install when I have a spare machine+disk available, but that will be a little while.
dialog is a strange beast that way, and it's a known issue for the live cd not ahndling the stdout/stderr correctly. The sad part is the way its done is the only way its possible without jumping through hoops. If you expereineced this issue while booted from a live cd environment it is know., Don't use -i mode, only -a That said thereis a brand new one comng up within a day or two (mirrorselect)
Install a fresh copy and run mirrorselect -i on the first console ( with the gentoo logo ). This is the way to reproduce it. If i run mirrorselect -i on another console it will run fine.
I had similar problem with 1.4-rc5 stage 1 live cd. Only on second system installed with same livecd. I had system fully functional before using mirrorselect the first time and it worked flawlessly. Wanted to select same mirror (shoulda just gottent the mirror string from 1st machine :) on second install sooner to get better throughput. 2nd machine was in the chroot environment when I did it and it appeared the same as prev user described, a ton of ascii chars at bottom of make.conf. A soln I used to fix make.conf wc -l make.conf -> get # lines head -n #lines-1 > temp mv temp make.conf All of the chars at the bottom gave vi fits so had to use other means. I think you guys are correct in that it is during the install that mirrorselect bombs.
