From what I understand, Gentoo's release procedure is in violation of several open source licenses. As we do not distribute full sources along with the stages and cd images, any user is entitled to request them from the Gentoo Foundation, and the Foundation must oblige. Which is reasonably easy to do in the following couple of weeks (months?) after a given release because we provide the snapshot and the distfiles are in the mirrors, but as the tree evolves, files disappear from the mirrors. So I propose that on our mirrors we provide a releases/distfiles/200X.Y directories with the sum of distfiles needed to recreate the stages and cd/netboot images from the release snapshot with catalyst. This way we will be able to comply with the (I believe) about three years of source availability imposed by GPL and (with higher probability) the requirements of the other licences. Note: This is somewhat related to bug #172695, but that bug deals with the technical need to preserve distfiles and that is only needed for the last release. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
Maybe you should bother talking to the team in question before posting such a completely incorrect bug that makes us all look like idiots. We keep a copy of the distfiles, which anyone can request. We don't keep them on the mirrors because we don't see the need to burden our mirror admins with the additional space requirements.
