Bug 362475 – Extend "Fetch failed" section with information about GENTOO_MIRRORS maintenance

• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
• Product: [OLD] Docs on www.gentoo.org

[Description Jeroen Roovers (RETIRED) 2011-04-07 17:03:44 UTC]

Many bugs are filed because fetching from SRC_URI fails, when in most cases this can be solved by simply updating GENTOO_MIRRORS to something current and valid.

Bugs should only be filed in these cases:

1) RESTRICT=fetch
2) An official mirror is out of sync, in which case it should be taken out of the
   rotation and/or mirrors2.xml.

So keeping GENTOO_MIRRORS up to date should prevent quite a few cases where:

1) A non- or no longer supported mirror is used.
2) GENTOO_MIRRORS is unset.

In the same sweep, we could suggest (as should [1], where the installation step is now branded "optional") that GENTOO_MIRRORS should be set to something relatively close to home, instead of using the master or something that happens to be fast at that moment in time.

[1] http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=6#doc_chap1

[Comment 1 Jan Kundrát (RETIRED) 2011-04-14 09:16:56 UTC]

I realize that this can be very hard with the HTTP and FTP mirrors having different paths, but could we perhaps get a server-side solution for this one? I see that [1] already does soemthing similar for downloading releases, so it's apparently possible.

Is there are reason Portage does not try "distfiles.gentoo.org" between the user-supplied ones and the SRC_URI fallback?

CCing portage folks for answer; I'll always prefer a technical colution over documentation workarounds.

[1] http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/where.xml

[Comment 2 Zac Medico 2011-04-15 07:43:43 UTC]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Is there are reason Portage does not try "distfiles.gentoo.org" between the
> user-supplied ones and the SRC_URI fallback?

We've discussed this in bug 354555 and I think bug 354555, comment #16 is a reasonable solution.

[Comment 3 Jan Kundrát (RETIRED) 2011-05-09 20:33:25 UTC]

(In reply to comment #2)
> We've discussed this in bug 354555 and I think bug 354555, comment #16 is a
> reasonable solution.

Thanks. I've added a comment there.

The GDP believes that it's much better to pester Portage folks to introduce sane defaults :) than to provide detailed documentation about how to copy-paste default settings into configuration files -> WONTFIX.

[Comment 4 SpanKY 2011-05-09 21:03:58 UTC]

portage has always had sane defaults.  the issue is with people who change the defaults (and thus are no longer using the defaults).