The current method of emerge rsync requires client machines to download the entire portage tree of ebuilds, regardless of what is being installed. This method leads to excessive bandwidth requirements, and can be significantly reduced by changing the behaviour and purpose of emerge rsync. It is proposed that client machines no longer maintain an entire portage tree, but rather a "flat file" of available packages, and their dependency relations with eachother. When a user wishes to emerge a package, the dependencies would be calculated as usual, and each of these packages' ebuilds would be downloaded from an rsync server in turn. Thus, emerg'ing samba would result in the client machine Only retrieving ebuild files for samba, and any packages it relies on. The traditional emerge rsync method would disappear, and should be discouraged. This method would dramatically reduce bandwidth requirements for both clients and rsync mirror providers.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 7624 ***
