everyone has to download and compile everything by themselves. I would like to be able to delegate some fixed size to the 'Portage Distributed Filesystem'. The distributed filesystem would have, instead of only the packages that we emerged, pieces of any of the gentoo source files (AND maybe even binary packages). it would be used to fetch the sources using some p2p protocol (dumb example: a private ed2k network). instead of having full-sized sources, though, it would have pieces, if the packages are too big (OpenOffice), and the files to be put there are decided by portage and should use idle connection time, or have a data transmission cap. If tampering is to be prevented, it could be a loopback encrypted filesystem to which only portage would have the key (maybe downloaded from the internet). What for? for us to offload the servers, to have binary packages always available, at least for the GRP, and maybe every package on portage (I can dream). And in the future the same filesystem could be used for WORLDWIDE distributed compilation (distcc). Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
In regards to binaries... No. Very insecure and will not be supported by portage any time soon, if ever, without proper officialness-testing. GRP/binpkg support already exists as an officially supported system for distributing binary packages. Support for alternate distfiles/sources is still a reasonable request though. A proper daemon to support the p2p-style file transfers would be required first though.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 8468 ***