recently (after the last upgrade of portage to portage-2.0.49-r3) I've noticed that all folder-categories in the portage tree have get some garbage files called "timestamp.x" It's not documented and it is not announced. And it breakes all (albeit proprietary) portage wrappers if they assume that each name in the folder-category is the package name (there is no actual package named timestamp.x in any of portage categories!). IMHO such breaking changes must be at first publicly anounced and right after that - documented.
forgot to mention: I cannot upgrade Portage on the production servers as it will break some of my scripts, which are done without assuming of such timestamp.x files. That's why I've marked the bug as a "blocker".
I introduced those files for monitoring mirrors, and they will more than likely stay. I'm sorry for your troubles. I'm fairly certain you wouldn't want notice every time I changed the location, format, and frequency of a timestamp or random bit of data in the tree. The assumption of all-directories isn't a very good assumption. Add a check to ensure it's a directory. It'll save you trouble later. In bash: [ ! -d "${DIR}" ] && continue test -d "${DIR}" <--- Returns true/false on most every Unix os out there.
Why not make the name starting wit "." (dot) character? Many scripts won't see it. Even humans won't see it when using "ls -ls" command (without "-a" option) Is it possible to rename it?
Yes, it's possible. No, I won't change it.
*** Bug 31298 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
