Bug 29011 – timestamp.x files in the portage tree

• Product: Portage Development
• Status: RESOLVED INVALID

[Description Axxackall 2003-09-17 14:59:10 UTC]

recently (after the last upgrade of portage to portage-2.0.49-r3) I've noticed
that all folder-categories in the portage tree have get some garbage files
called "timestamp.x"

It's not documented and it is not announced. And it breakes all (albeit
proprietary) portage wrappers if they assume that each name in the
folder-category is the package name (there is no actual package named
timestamp.x in any of portage categories!).

IMHO such breaking changes must be at first publicly anounced and right after
that - documented.

[Comment 1 Axxackall 2003-09-17 15:01:12 UTC]

forgot to mention: I cannot upgrade Portage on the production servers as it will break some of my scripts, which are done without assuming of such timestamp.x files. That's why I've marked the bug as a "blocker".

[Comment 2 Nicholas Jones (RETIRED) 2003-09-18 19:14:00 UTC]

I introduced those files for monitoring mirrors, and they will more than
likely stay. I'm sorry for your troubles.

I'm fairly certain you wouldn't want notice every time I changed the
location, format, and frequency of a timestamp or random bit of data
in the tree.

The assumption of all-directories isn't a very good assumption.
Add a check to ensure it's a directory. It'll save you trouble later.

In bash:
[ ! -d "${DIR}" ] && continue

test -d "${DIR}"  <--- Returns true/false on most every Unix os out there.

[Comment 3 Axxackall 2003-09-23 18:53:42 UTC]

Why not make the name starting wit "." (dot) character? Many scripts won't see it. Even humans won't see it when using "ls -ls" command (without "-a" option)

Is it possible to rename it?

[Comment 4 Nicholas Jones (RETIRED) 2003-10-08 00:42:12 UTC]

Yes, it's possible.
No, I won't change it.

[Comment 5 Marius Mauch (RETIRED) 2003-10-16 12:20:53 UTC]

*** Bug 31298 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***