The git mirror for sync-ing the portage tree with git at the above URL does not provide metadata/timestamp.chk. While this is fine for the machine doing `emerge --sync`, if that box further exports the tree via rsyncd, `emerge --sync` fails on boxes trying to rsync off of it. I hit this at home where I have one central server serving out the portage tree with rsyncd. When I switch it to sync-ing by git, all hell broke loose on my dozens of vms that rsync off of it. I could use git-daemon and switch them all, but ... ouch! Here's the failing message: # emerge --sync >>> Syncing repository 'gentoo' into '/usr/portage'... >>> Starting rsync with rsync://192.168.3.1/portage... >>> Checking server timestamp ... receiving incremental file list rsync: link_stat "/metadata/timestamp.chk" (in portage) failed: No such file or directory (2) As a workaround, manually creating metadata/timestamp.chk fixes things. We should fix this in the emerge --sync code. Its easy enough but I don't know why that timestamp is there so I'll let the portage team decide what to do with it. Reproducible: Always
Actually, its even worse. So sync-ing the first time works if you add the timestamp, but after that emerge --sync via rsync fails with # emerge --sync >>> Syncing repository 'gentoo' into '/usr/portage'... !!! /usr/portage appears to be under revision control (contains .git). !!! Aborting rsync sync. This is something of a mess. I'm sure my situation isn't atypical. This will force me to either 1) switch back to rsync on my central box or 2) switch over many vms to using git. to sync.
It looks like you need to add postsync hooks, on the serving one, one that creates the tiemstamp. On the client machines one that removes the .git dir. The alternative is to create an rsync tree on the server that does all those steps. We'll have to see about configuring the .git/revision control check in the rsync module.
I'm going to look into adding metadata/timestamp.chk to mirrors. However, the problem is that it should be updated only when something actually changes in the repository, and pkgcore doesn't have any functionality to do that. So I'll probably have to find a good place for it in my scripts, and figure out when stuff actually changes. (In reply to Brian Dolbec from comment #2) > It looks like you need to add postsync hooks, on the serving one, one that > creates the tiemstamp. On the client machines one that removes the .git dir. How about... --exclude option of rsync?
metadata/timestamp.chk now exists in all gentoo-mirror/ repositories (unless I failed at one of them :)). It should also be updated precisely when something changes (either in repo or in caches).
*** Bug 567074 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Holy cow, it's late. Sorry for the noise.
