Review gentoo part of Going Beyond LFS

[ken@…]

In ​https://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/sympa/arc/blfs-dev/2022-09/msg00001.html David Bryant has pointed to [ ​https://www.gentoo.org/downloads/mirrors/] for finding the source tarballs.

He also pointed to ​https://gentoo.osuosl.org/ as the mirror he usually uses.

I'd prefer not to address this until I (or someone else) has a real use-case to work through. When google finds me an ebuild fix that seems to match the problem, it typically says it was fixed in either a specific patch (simples, but not always easy to find) or in version n of a patches distfile where the current version might be n+7 - sometimes the descriptions are clear, other times they need more digging to work out which patch(es) are relevant.

[ken@…]

David added to this:

OK, Ken. Here is some more information for you. I've been keeping notes when I update my Gentoo system with the "emerge" command. Here are three U.S. mirrors that are almost always up to date. Once in a while one of them gets to be a whole day behind. There's also a server in Zurich, Switzerland that I contact when all the US mirrors have dropped the ball. I'll supply that URL someday soon.

​https://166.78.229.131/gentoo-portage/ ​https://72.4.120.219/gentoo-portage/ ​https://208.100.4.53/gentoo-portage/

The first two are Rackspace servers. The third one is also known as

​https://www.steadfast.net

[ken@…]

My previous comments about waiting for an issue to fix (so that I know what I write will work!) remain. But Bruce wanted to assign this to me. For histerical reasons I'm not a plain 'ken' here :)

[ken@…]

I thought I'd commented in this at the weekend: The numbered URIs give https errors in firefox - I looked at steadfast.net, the cert is only valid for mirror.steadfast.net and debian-security.mirror.steadfast.net. Going in via the mirror address, I found what I was looking for at ​https://mirror.steadfast.net/gentoo-portage/

NB for gentoo, first find a recent ebuild and look for a likely fix. If it is a patch, note where the package is in their directory structure (e.g. boost is in dev-libs/boost), navigate there via the mirror, and look in the files/ directory.

For the other two the cert is valid for mirror.rackspace.com (I assume you will get one or the other) so ​https://mirror.rackspace.com/gentoo-portage/.

I will note that for packages where gentoo provide patches in a tarball (such as firefox and glibc, which was my original problem) this does NOT help in finding a particular version of the patchset tqarball, those are in directories for a developer and different mirrors may not have them.

In the absence of a reliable mirror in Europe (Zurich was mentioned, but I cannot find its name or address) I'll go with this.

[ken@…]

Fixed in 6ad6bace8bed79e13cb05797f12e9b693e52d95d 11.2-747

Done, unless anyone ever finds a reliable way to discover other full-system gentoo-portage mirrors.