For all of those awaiting a more permenant fix to bug #85559, this has now been done. Hopefully you vanilla-sources users (specifically) will benefit from a big bandwidth saving.
Also on a similar note, there has been a lot of confusion recently about 2.4/2.6 kernel versions and headers. Let me clear this up.
Many moons ago portage didnt have support for cascading profiles, although the 2.5 kernel had just been made 2.6 and progress was being made on stabalising support for it in Gentoo. The issues we had meant that we had to rename the 2.6 versions into a new package. For example: linux-headers contained 2.4, and linux26-headers contained 2.6.
This meant that managing the dependancies within ebuilds was awkward and amongst other things, far from ideal.
It was also an illogical seperation of what is fundementally the same thing. You dont for example see vim5 vim6 etc, you just have vim.
Now then, what we did recently, with the help of cascading profiles was amalgamate these packages into their relevant counter-parts. Therefore, we now have vanilla-sources-2.{0,2,4,6}* and linux-headers-2.{4,6}* and it is up to the profiles you run to manage which versions should be unmasked for you.
As part of this move we also moved to 2.6 by default for many architectures. As a result, and in true gentoo philosophy, you will find underneath your profile either a 2.6 or most likely a 2.4 subdirectory. If you link your profile to that directory instead then you will no longer be forced to update to 2.6, however I do encourage you to upgrade if you have no valid technical reason to stay.
So with this concludes:
emerge yourfavourite-sources
will emerge 2.4, OR 2.6 depending on your profile. Most likely 2.6
emerge linux-headers
will merge the appropriate headers.
IF you are upgrading from 2.4 to the newer 2.6 as part of this move, PLEASE PLEASE ensure your new kernel is installed and running along side your new 2.6 headers, since there are several reports of random segfaults occuring with 2.6 headers on a 2.4 kernel.
If you find that its installing a version you dont want, then just relink your /etc/make.profile to ${PORTDIR}/profiles/default-linux/x86/2005.0/XX where XX is 2.4 (or 2.6 on different archs in some cases).
Hopefully this has now brought some clarity to the situation 🙂