[gentoo-dev] gentoo 1.2 Build instructions: proxy info in make.conf useless for bootstrap

[Oliver Schoett]

Dear folks,

I had a bit of a hard time installing gentoo 1.2.  Partly this was due 
to being behind a firewall that would not pass rsync traffic.  But 
there is also an error in the install instructions

    http://gentoo.org/doc/build.html

Section 11. "Progressing from stage1 to stage2" says

    First edit the file /etc/make.conf. [...]
    If necessary, you can also set proxy information here
    if you are behind a firewall.

This is bad advice for people behind a firewall, because during the 
execution of scripts/bootstrap.sh, the file /etc/make.conf gets 
replaced temporarily with a fresh file that does not have the proxy 
information.

Result: bootstrap.sh fails (cannot wget gettext), and on the second 
attempt the hand-edited make.conf (which has been moved to 
make.conf.build and not moved back due to the failure) gets clobbered.

The instruction should be corrected to tell the user to set the proxy 
information in the environment thus:

    export http_proxy="machine.company.com:1234"
    export ftp_proxy="$http_proxy"
    export RSYNC_PROXY="$http_proxy"

(Trying to set the information in /etc/wget/wgetrc fails for similar 
reasons during "emerge system", because the file gets clobbered when 
wget is built).

Regards,

Oliver Schoett