In tor version 0.1.2.17: it seems that the ebuild builds tor with default torrc being ~user/.config/torrc of the user who issued emerge, or something like that. At least, "man tor" shows this default under the "-f" option. Thus, /etc/init.d/tor checks /etc/tor/torrc for validity, and then it is ignored. A symptom is that /var/lib/tor/.tor directory is created. I fixed this by adding -f ${CONFFILE} to start() in /etc/init.d/tor, but the ebuild should be probably fixed instead, so that /etc/tor/torrc is the default. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
(In reply to comment #0) Erm... man tor: <snip> -f FILE FILE contains further "option value" pairs. (Default: /etc/tor/torrc) </snip> I also don't have any /var/lib/tor/.tor and the whole thing generally works perfectly fine and honors what's the default per the above manpage. So, if you could tell us how to reproduce the issue, that'd really help.
I have played with the source tarball, turns out that Tor's configure script uses CONFDIR environment variable if it is set. So steps to reproduce: setenv CONFDIR to something, then emerge. Now, it can be argued that it's not a bug, but a feature, but at least for me it caused a big non-obvious problem, since /etc/init.d/tor validates against /etc/tor/torrc explicitly. I suggest unsetting CONFDIR in the ebuild (if it's defined).
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 56407 ***
