Recent "eselect news" specified that upcoming stages will have make.conf and make.profile in /etc/portage instead of the old location of /etc. app-portage/fetchcommandwrapper-0.7.1 has a hardcoded path to the old location of make.conf: $ ack 'make\.conf' /usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/fetchcommandwrapper/main.py p = subprocess.Popen(['/bin/bash', '-c', 'source /etc/make.conf; echo ${GENTOO_MIRRORS}'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE) Anyone who attempts to install fetchcommandwrapper after installing from the new media (or proactively tries to move the files to the new locations as I did) will be unable to fetch distfiles.
0.7.2 has p = subprocess.Popen(['/usr/bin/portageq', 'gentoo_mirrors'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE) instead. Closing as fixed.