Created attachment 598624 [details] emerge_-pf_bash.txt See attachment which shows an example with "emerge -pf bash". Same happens with -pF switch combination.
Portage needs information from layout.conf to output the correct URI format depending on how GENTOO_MIRRORS is set. I think the only alternative would be to emit an error.
For pretend mode we could increase the TTL of the layout.conf cache.
The -pf switch combination worked fine with sys-apps/portage-2.3.69:0. Fails as described with sys-apps/portage-2.3.79:0 and sys-apps/portage-2.3.84-r1:0.
*** Bug 722982 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This is really annoying as I have a computer not on the Internet on purpose and I need emerge to produce a list of URI, so I can provide the needed distfiles for that computer, but since this layout.conf is needed I get a lot of error messages of not being able to download layout.conf instead of just a list or URI to be downloaded..