Hi, everybody.

It is my pleasure to announce that yesterday (EU) evening we've switched
to a new distfile mirror layout.  Users will be switching to the new
layout either as they upgrade Portage to 2.3.77 or -- if they upgraded
already -- as their caches expire (24hrs).

The new layout is mostly a bow towards mirror admins, for some of whom
having a 60000+ files in a single directory have been a problem. 
However, I suppose some of you also found e.g. the directory index
hardly usable due to its size.

Throughout a transitional period (whose exact length hasn't been decided
yet), both layouts will be available.  Afterwards, the old layout will
be removed from mirrors.  This has a few implications:

1. Users who don't upgrade their package managers in time will lose
the ability of fetching from Gentoo mirrors.  This shouldn't be that
much of a problem given that the core software needed to upgrade Portage
should all have reliable upstream SRC_URIs.

2. mirror://gentoo/file URIs will stop working.  While technically you
could use mirror://gentoo/XX/file, I'd rather recommend finally
discarding its usage and moving distfiles to devspace.

3. Directly fetching files from distfiles.gentoo.org will become
a little harder.  To fetch a distfile named 'foo-1.tar.gz', you'd have
to use something like:

$ printf '%s' foo-1.tar.gz | b2sum | cut -c1-2
1b
$ wget http://distfiles.gentoo.org/distfiles/1b/foo-1.tar.gz
...


Alternatively, you can:

$ wget http://distfiles.gentoo.org/distfiles/INDEX

and grep for the right path there.  This INDEX is also a more
lightweight alternative to HTML indexes generated by the servers.


If you're interested in more background details and some plots, see [1].

[1] https://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/articles/improving-distfile-mirror-structure.html

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny