Re: [gentoo-user] packages going stable after sources become unavailable

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, Sep 8, 2019 at 11:38 AM Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This seems to happen regularly with Imagemagick.  Version 7.0.8.60
> just went stable today, yet it can't be built because version 7.0.8.60
> sources can no longer be downloaded.
>
> Am I doing something wrong?
>
> Shouldn't there be a requirement that an ebuild actually be
> _buildable_ from scratch when it goes stable?
>

Do you have a working Gentoo distfile mirror in your make.conf?

imagemagic has a mirror:// SRC_URI.  That means there is no upstream
distfile available, and Gentoo is distributing its own file via the
mirrors (this is actually frowned upon these days though I'm not sure
if it is banned offhand - I just avoid doing it this way).  Usually
the better practice is to host the file somewhere (such as the Gentoo
webserver), and it will be mirrored anyway.  These mirror:// files are
manually injected into the mirror system by developers, and then they
stick around as long as some ebuild references them, and then they
just go poof without a trace (which means users with older repos can
have issues).  There has been talk about more robust solutions for
these files (especially patches/etc), but nothing has happened.

If your system isn't configured with a working Gentoo distfile mirror
then for most packages you're probably downloading everything from
upstream, but these mirror:// URIs have no sources other than the
mirrors so if you don't have a working mirror config it simply won't
fetch at all.

In general anything in the tree should be fetchable.  If that isn't
the case it should be quickly spotted and fixed/removed, and it is
always a valid bug, assuming it isn't just a local issue on your
system.  I wouldn't file a bug for this issue - I suspect QA would
have already if it wanted to make it a strict policy.  This sort of
thing is trivially detected with a tinderbox or repoman if desired.

-- 
Rich