I miss a hint to a local portage snapshot in section 5.d of the gentoo installation handbook. If someone installs gentoo i.e. without a running network connection, it would help him to untar the local portage snapshot on the 2005.1 livecd "/mnt/cdrom/snapshots/portage-20050709.tar.bz2".
Not an infra bug.
You are reading wrong document. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/2005.1/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=5#doc_chap4