Gentoo Development Guide
Mirrors
Automatic Mirroring
Packages will automatically have their SRC_URI components mirrored onto
Gentoo mirrors. When fetching, Portage checks Gentoo mirrors first before
trying the original upstream location.
This is generally desired behaviour — upstream mirrors are prone to being rearranged, tidied out or having files modified.
Restricting Automatic Mirroring
Three RESTRICT keywords can be used to control the mirroring process.
The RESTRICT="mirror" setting should be used if we cannot legally mirror
certain files; files will still be downloaded from the original locations.
The RESTRICT="primaryuri" setting causes Portage to try
original locations first, and then fall back to mirrors if necessary
—
this
is sometimes useful if approximate download counts are needed, or if upstream
have a reliable mirror setup.
There is also RESTRICT="fetch", which prevents Portage from trying to
fetch anything manually. The
pkg_nofetch function will be called if any SRC_URI components cannot be
found. This should only be used if a license requires it.
Suitable Download Hosts
Hosting files off dev.gentoo.org is not acceptable for main-tree items.
Instead, these files must be moved onto mirror://gentoo before release.
Gentoo Mirrors
To manually upload a file to mirror://gentoo, scp it to
dev.gentoo.org:/space/distfiles-local. You must ensure that the permissions
are set to ug+rw manually. The file should appear on the mirrors within four
hours (note that this is less frequent than
CVS to RSYNC).
If the upstream download location for a package uses a non-standard TCP port
(anything other than 21, 80 or 443), you must manually mirror the files. Not
doing so can cause all kinds of problems with strict firewalls.
Mirroring Process
Diagram showing the mirroring process.
