Why not just put all of portage on read-only NBD volumes?

[nokilli]

The tree, the distfiles, all of it.

Do mirrors just like is being done now with http, https, rsync....

Only now, you're inviting the public to mount the network block device and access it like it's a local drive.

Go further, and make it part of the handbook, where you have everybody setting up the chroot. In the same way if you were using nfs for portage, by doing those mounts before the chroot.

The final system could do something which uses dm-cache or lvm's cache or whatever to make it so that files that are effectively downloaded from the NBD volume can be reused later without having to re-fetch.

A NBD server should be a simple affair. You're identifying bandwidth abusers at the block level ffs, people who try dd get throttled quickly and easily.

And you'd have the only distro as far as I can tell that allows users some piece of mind as they perform updates of their system. Everybody else seems to either demand simultaneous access to your home directory with the tls connection back to the mothership or works hard to break any proxy solution the community comes up with to gain some measure of control over their data.

The install cd combined with the read-only repository drive should provide excellent privacy for its users.

Moved from "Portage & Programming" to "Gentoo Chat". --Zucca
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Today is the first day of the rest of your Gentoo installation.

[John R. Graham]

I've tried it and I didn't like it—with the repositories, at least. My own personal experience is that Portage performance with a remotely mounted repository is dramatically lower than with a local copy. This is principally during the dependency resolution process. I do sync my home server against Gentoo and then sync all my other machines against my home server, but that's more out of respect for Gentoo's donated bandwidth than anything else. My home server also shares its /usr/portage/distfiles with the rest of the network for the same reason.

- John
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I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters.