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

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

[Grant Edwards]

I've noticed on several occasions in the past few months that by the
time some packages are marked stable, the version is old enough that
sources are no longer available -- so the emerge fails because sources
can no longer be downloaded.  If I'm lucky I may have a copy of the
sources on another machine.  If I'm not lucky, I just wait until the
next time a new version goes stable and hope that it's not been
obsoleted.

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?

-- 
Grant

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

[Rich Freeman]

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

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

[Grant Edwards]

On 2019-09-08, Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 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?

Doh!  Apparently, both of the mirrors I have configured are broken:

  GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://lug.mtu.edu/gentoo/ http://cosmos.illinois.edu/pub/gentoo/"

The first one is out-of-date and doesn't contain the the last few
versions of ImageMagick. The second is just plain AWOL.

I've updated make.conf with a couple mirrors that I've manually
verified, and now my update is building as expected.  I guess I need
to add verifying mirrors are present and correct to the list of normal
maintainence activities.

--
Grant