Bugzilla Bug 24296

I came across a bug today with the java-sdk-docs package, which ended up being
that this package wasn't set up to properly support requiring users to manually
download the distfile for it (see bug #24274) - As it turns out (once I
remembered) I had actually submitted a fix for this very problem, which is
currently in Portage, described in bug #10347.

Essentially, what happens is that for packages that require the user to manually
download distfiles, you put just the filename in SRC_URI, add RESTRICT="fetch"
to the ebuild, and then (optionally) put in some informative text in a
pkg_nofetch() hook in the ebuild file.  This allows portage to keep track of
digests for files it can't download itself, allows "emerge -f" to function
properly with respect to alerting the user that something needs to be
downloaded, and (I feel) is generally a good thing.

While looking around for the solution to the problem, I noticed that the
Developers HOWTO mentions the pkg_nofetch() function and describes what it's
used for, but the HOWTO doesn't mention setting the RESTRICT option or SRC_URI
to ensure that pkg_nofetch will actually get called...  Without knowning about
RESTRICT="fetch" the pkg_nofetch function will never get called.

Anyway, I felt that it should probably be mentioned in the docs; I'll submit a
patch in just a bit to that effect...  Thanks!

Created an attachment (id=14387) [details]
gentoo-howto.diff

This patch to doc/en/gentoo-howto.xml is probably just about all that would be
needed.  I was originally thinking that maybe a small section on what to do if
a distfile can't be automatically downloaded may be good, but since that
doesn't happen very often, just a little mention of it in the pkg_nofetch()
description would probably do just as well...  Though I could be off-base on
all this, feel free to tell me I'm full of it.	:)

Thanks for the patch, sorry it took so long to reply :(

err i'm gonna steal this because i have a diff against the howto atm that is
pretty 
much the entire file ... and i think i already fixed this in my local copy ... 

How's your updated gentoo-howto? Have you incorporated the latest gentoo-howto
changes?

howto's been updated