>>>>> On Tue, 22 Oct 2019, Jaco Kroon wrote:

> I also agree with others that it used to be easy to get distfiles as
> and when needed, so an alternative structure could mirror that of the
> portage tree itself, in other words "cat/pkg/distfile".

Not a good idea, because some distfiles are shared between packages.
For example, sys-kernel/*-sources use the same distfiles. (It won't
work with categories either, e.g., there are dev-lang/ruby and
app-emacs/ruby-mode.)

Ulrich