I have portage and distfiles shared over NFS from a headless box and there is a need to fetch large tarballs. Currently fetchonly fails unless I specify required USE flag(s). It would be nice to have a "clean" fetchonly capability. server ~ # emerge -af --nodeps chromium These are the packages that would be fetched, in order: !!! Problem resolving dependencies for www-client/chromium !!! The ebuild selected to satisfy "chromium" has unmet requirements. - www-client/chromium-109.0.5414.74::gentoo USE="hangouts js-type-check official (pic) proprietary-codecs suid system-av1 system-harfbuzz system-icu system-png -X (-component-build) -cups -custom-cflags -debug -gtk4 (-headless) -kerberos -libcxx -lto (-pgo) -pulseaudio -qt5 -screencast (-selinux) (-system-ffmpeg) -vaapi -wayland -widevine" L10N="-af -am -ar -bg -bn -ca -cs -da -de -el -en-GB -es -es-419 -et -fa -fi -fil -fr -gu -he -hi -hr -hu -id -it -ja -kn -ko -lt -lv -ml -mr -ms -nb -nl -pl -pt-BR -pt-PT -ro -ru -sk -sl -sr -sv -sw -ta -te -th -tr -uk -ur -vi -zh-CN -zh-TW" The following REQUIRED_USE flag constraints are unsatisfied: !headless? ( any-of ( X wayland ) ) The above constraints are a subset of the following complete expression: component-build? ( !suid !libcxx ) screencast? ( wayland ) !headless? ( any-of ( X wayland ) ) pgo? ( X !wayland )
Why not do the fetching on whatever system needs the package, where the USE flags are presumably already valid?
All desktops use VPN, my headless multipurpose server does not. I'd like to download huge tarballs directly instead of doing it over VPN.
There's another bug for this somewhere but can't find it yet.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 329151 ***
OK. But the original bug is over 12 years old. You sure the same reasoning is still valid? For instance, I used Gmail over 18 years, last summer I deleted my Google account after discovering it has an unannounced blacklist causing email from some domains to be deleted instead of delivering. Times change, what was good yesterday may bite us today. Same with VPN, in 2010 I did not feel the need for it, I certainly do now. Tempora mutantur ...
Yes, it's the same problem and the same reasoning makes sense. You can proxy distfile downloads through your server through something like apt-cacher-ng.
I wonder if emirrordist could be extended to take a list of packages. That might be an easier route to take.
