emerge --sync verification failed then OK. Worry?

[GreenNeonWhale]

To put this as shortly as possible. I just did an emerge --sync on my box. It went to the Indiana University rsync mirror, rsync25.us.gentoo.org, and synced. I know it was this mirror as they have very nice ASCII art at the beginning. The sync then failed with this message:

[Goverp]

I am not a lawyer, but

[NeddySeagoon]

GreenNeonWhale,

be afraid ... be very afraid :)

Portage will not let you use a failed sync. .tmp-unverified-download-quarantine will not be merged into your copy of the repo if the gpg check fails.
You did the right thing and portage kept you safe.

The mirrors and your copy of the repo are updated with rsync, which does not do atomic updates for the whole repo.
There is thus a window when you can get part of an old copy of the repo and part of a new one.

This window has got much smaller that it was, with the introduction of the .tmp-unverified-download-quarantine step but it still exists.
Now, its just the copy time from .tmp-unverified-download-quarantine to the main repo, before that it was the entire sync time.

Before tree signing, errors of this nature were detected at emerge time but they wore still detected.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[GreenNeonWhale]

Thank you Goverp, and NeddySeagoon for the helpful replies.