I have recently built two new WWW mirrors containing certain publicly-available software:

1. Historic Gentoo Distfiles.

I have been using Gentoo for nearly all Linux-related work since 2007. It was "the lesser of evils": to my knowledge, no other Linux variant ever offered a comparable level of rodenticidal control, while at the same time providing an adequate means of automatically cutting through "dependency hell".

This uniqueness made Gentoo a target for concerted attack by the Enemy, on a variety of fronts. Through creeping Poetteringism, the cancerous blight of GCC 5+, and the eventual decay -- fostered by corrupt maintainers -- of the portage system into unusability, it became nearly impossible to set up a hygienic Gentoo system from scratch.

The minute you try emerge --sync, you will be force-fed a boiling ocean of liquid shit under the name of "progress". And the machine will have to be scrubbed and re-OSed, if you wish to continue with civilized life on it.

Eventually I resorted to creating "canned" Gentoos using bitwise copies of old installations. (E.g. this system for ARM-64, and this one for AMD-64, are provided for my ISP service customers.)

One obvious problem with the "canned" approach is the decay of the official Gentoo distfiles mirrors. At one time these operated purely by accretion, i.e. added new packages while preserving the old. At a certain point this changed, and the servants of "progress" began to sabotage the ecosystem by deliberately removing "ungodly" packages. Mirror operators which refused to participate in this "cultural revolution" were delisted and you will not find them via the Gentoo WWW -- even supposing their mirrors are still standing (many have simply given up.)

Until and unless a cultural "reset" takes place, and something like what Gentoo tried to be in 2007 again exists as a living entity, I intend to continue the use of my hand-curated "fossilized" variants. And to make this easier for others, I have put together a public distfiles mirror:

http://dulap.xyz/gentoo/distfiles

... using the contents of my backup tapes from a multitude of Gentoo systems I have operated.

Gentoo users may add this URL to their GENTOO_MIRRORS list in /etc/portage/make.conf; or download any necessary tarballs into their local /usr/portage/distfiles by hand; this is a matter of taste.

WARNING: this repository is offered with no warranty or endorsement of any kind, and certainly contains software with dangerous flaws. It does not necessarily reflect the current configuration of any of the Gentoo machines I presently use (although packages from both the RK and the "Dulap" variant's default distfiles directories are all present.) I have trimmed some -- but by no means all! -- of the obvious garbage. It goes without saying that I am not responsible for the contents of the tarballs, or even their integrity. Please do not use tarballs for which you do not have an authoritative signature for safety-critical work! From this -- or any other public repository.

Any and all questions regarding the above -- I prefer to answer here.

People from my L1 WoT who wish to contribute specimens to this collection, are invited to contact me.

At this time, the Gentoo collection weighs ~16GB.

2. GNAT.

The following mirror now contains a multitude of GNAT and miscellaneous Ada-related packages/dependencies, obtained on April 10, 2020 via JFW's method:

http://dulap.xyz/ada

READMEs, as well as MS-Win and Apple binaries have been omitted. Packages with duplicate names are stored in the "dupes" subdirectories (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

The same warning as given for the Gentoo repository applies to this collection.

At this time, the Ada collection weighs ~17GB. Aside from the binaries removal, this set was not curated in any way.

Readers are encouraged to mirror the mirrors. Anyone who has done this, is encouraged to leave a comment here, with the URL of the new mirror.