In section 6a of the handbook, it says: --- begin --- Optional: Updating Portage If you haven't installed a Portage snapshot in the previous chapter, you must download a recent Portage tree from the Internet. emerge sync does this for you. Other users should skip this and continue with Configuring the USE variable. --- end --- The last sentence should probably be changed to something like: "The installed Portage snapshot should probably also be updated using emerge sync, especially if installing from a LiveCD that are more than a few months old, to prevent the installation from failing due to requirements for obsolete software versions that have been removed from the Gentoo mirrors." Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Install Gentoo from stage 1 using LiveCD 2004.1 according to the handbook. Actual Results: The installation fails in scripts/bootstrap.sh before reaching stage 2. The bootstraping must therefore be repeated, after running the emerge sync command. Expected Results: Complete the installation of stage 2, and subsequently stage 3 ... ;-) The installation fails while running scripts/bootstrap.sh, in this case with the error: Couldn't download rc-scripts-1.4.8.tar.bz2. Aborting. The problem is that the current version of rc-scripts is 1.4.16 (or 1.5.1) and that the old/obsolete 1.4.8 version therefore has been removed from the mirrors, where 1.4.9 currently is the oldest version. PS: The handbook might also suggest using "scripts/bootstrap.sh -f" to insure that all the software for the bootstrapping is available, in the required versions, before spending hours compiling, just to discover that some required software has become unavailable, in the required version, and that the compilations therefore must be repeated with newer versions. PPS: This problem has previously been reported as bug #56247 ten days ago, but without reference to the installation documentation in the handbook.
The sentence says "you must" and you must. I have the feeling you mixed up two different installation paths. If you unpacked a portage snapshot in chapter 5, it means you're doing a networkless installation in which case you should not be running bootstrap because only a stage3 install is then available. If you run bootstrap because you do a stage1/2 install, then you *must* run emerge sync. I'll grant you that the sentence might give the impression that if you did unpack a snapshot even though you did not need it, you need not run "emerge sync" anymore. I'll look into it and try to make it more explicit later on unless another doc dev does it while I am away.
I've updated the installation instructions where the user needs to make his choice between a LiveCD-provided portage snapshot and a live Internet sync. It is now made more clear that the LiveCD-provided portage snapshot should only be used with networkless (stage3) installations.
