There are times (specially when machine is not connected to the internet), that would be usefull to get all URIs (output to STDOUT) to download packages by hand. Currently, I need to write down each URI by hand, but an option for that would be useful IMHO. Example: emerge -f foo1 foo2 --URIlist http://www.foo1.com/distfiles/foo1-xxx.tar.bz2 http://www.foo1.com/distfiles/foo1-xxx-do-something.patch http://www.foo2.com/distfiles/foo2-xxx.tar.bz2 I know it would not be useful for everybody, but I wanted to share this idea anyway. This way, I could download that packages from other place, and just place them in /usr/portage/distfiles What about it? Reproducible: Always
Even, this option could imply -f automatically (as --skip-first implies --resume for example).
I think emerge --pretend --fetch does this already, but maybe we need to document it.
But I only need to fetch 1 URI from each package, not all URIs from all packages.
Another problem with the existing output is that it doesn't account for SRC_URI arrows that have been supported since EAPI 2. So, you might have trouble getting your files to have the correct names.
Another proposal: It could be interesting too, to dump a list of portage's atoms to be emerged if another switch is active, interesting for downloading that software on another gentoo machine. In this case, only names with versions will be stored with only needed dependencies for that system, and not for system you are downloading in. This, combined with another option to import this file, and completelly ignore dependency check would be a solution. I saw some time ago, something like that in the old paludis client, which in case of failure had a line containing every packages that failed with its deps, and skipping dependency check. Example: emerge foo --PROPOSED_EXPORT_OPTION =dep1-xxxx =dep2-xxxx =dep3-xxxx =foo-xxxx emerge -f --PROPOSED_IMPORT_OPTION =dep1-xxxx =dep2-xxxx =dep3-xxxx =foo-xxxx Now, imagine that in target system, dep1 also depends on bar1, but in system you want to download packages, bar1 is NOT installed. Then, it will need to skip dependency check in order not to pull and download bar1, which is not really needed by target system. It also could disable keyword checking, arch checking and that plattform specific things, and only do what passed as an argument. To be safe, I suggest to force and imply the -f option.
(In reply to comment #4) > Another problem with the existing output is that it doesn't account for SRC_URI > arrows that have been supported since EAPI 2. So, you might have trouble > getting your files to have the correct names. Maybe a good solution for that would be to have (an option or default behavior) a wget friendly output. 1 line per each file
And its behavior can be to check it is downloadable before outputting to file. Example. emerge -f foo --URIlist --outputpath:/media/pendrive wget http://foo.com/foo.tar.bz2 -O /media/pendrive/foo-1.2.3.tar.bz2 wget http://foo.com/foo-patches.tar.bz2 -O /media/pendrive/foo-patches-1.2.3.tar.bz2 That way, it could handle => operator too, and possibly combining with --emptytree, you can have everything downloaded. As I said before, it could be useful in cases where the system where you execute this command have different keywords (or even different distro) than the one you will download software.
*** Bug 399109 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 587488 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Also, on the networked host, it could try to fstat() the files to be downloaded in /usr/portage/distfiles and if they are locally available, copy them to the pendriv, if not, then do the real network download. I could of course use basename to mangle the URLs and lookup the files through a shell loop, and run wget only if they are not locally available.
emerge -pf package already lists the URIs. There are two main problems: 1) It does not have an option for listing one URI per package and for omitting extra output (like :These are the packages...) so that it is ready to be imported into download managers with ease (this bug/suggestion). 2) As it is explained in this bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=587400 it would be super cool if emerge -pf checks DISTDIR for already downloaded files. Currently it does not check and lists all of the needed files for download regardless of the check if they have already been downloaded or not. It is clear that the second option has higher priority over the first one. This option has not been implemented in portage yet, and because of that, I and a lot of other users put much pressure on download servers for downloading already downloaded files.
