There is a time gap(few hours) between ebuild repo updates and src being synced as well. As a result, recent ebuild updates does not have src in it mirror and portage needs to download src instead. This leaves a permanent src file in distfiles which will not be replaced with a symlink once the src is synced to local mirror. The number of such files grows over time, taking up quite a lot of space. It would be nice if the time gap above could be minimized too.
It's not up to me but changing this sounds concerning given "replacing" would mean deleting data (even if it's just distfiles), wouldn't it make more sense to just run your own cleanup scripts? Not that I've been needing to replace anything with the order I run things in while using PORTAGE_RO_DISTDIRS myself.
(In reply to Ionen Wolkens from comment #1) > It's not up to me but changing this sounds concerning given "replacing" > would mean deleting data (even if it's just distfiles), wouldn't it make > more sense to just run your own cleanup scripts? > > Not that I've been needing to replace anything with the order I run things > in while using PORTAGE_RO_DISTDIRS myself. Using own scripts would defeat the purpose of PORTAGE_RO_DISTDIRS so I don't want to do that. PORTAGE_RO_DISTDIRS should on replace files it knows about, one could checksum the files first to make sure they are the same but I don't think that should be necessary.