It would be nice to be able to use /var/db/pkg as a repository tree on itself that can then be used by other machines on the network. Thus manually updating one machine and that other machine automatically (once a day) update their local repository and update to the packages listen in there.
You mean that emerging a package on one system results in it being emerged on other systems on your LAN? Let's move away from implementation specifics (/var/db/pkg) and talk a bit more about what you want to accomplish (automated LAN upgrades?)
i developed a quick and dirty solution for this kind of thing (assuming this is what you meant :)) ... first, a shared /usr/portage/ tree via samba or whatever net-fs floats your boat. export /usr/portage/ as read only with guest permissions. then export /usr/portage/distfiles/ with write permissions and guest access. this is of course a very large security problem on some networks, but in my case, i'm sitting on a personal house lan with 4 comps w/gentoo ... works wonders. if this is not a possibility, just do a mount -o bind on /usr/portage/distfiles (after you mount /usr/portage/ of course) to access the dir locally, and setup a local mirror in /etc/make.conf (wget -m --no-parent http://www.ibiblio.org/gentoo) finally, a local cron job that does 2 things: (1) emerge world -u -p (2) emerge world -u an e-mail is sent with (1) as the body and (2) as a zipped up attachment ... and of course on the server i run 'emerge rysnc' before the upgrades, grepping out "/$" and "files." ... emerge rsync | grep -v "/$" | grep -v "files."
same idea as #10149
Given the age and the fact that a clever setup is the fix for this problem...
