Hi! When I started fetchcommandwrapper about 6 years ago it was a proof of concept: It plugged into portage replacing wget for downloads, facilitating ${GENTOO_MIRRORS} and aria2 to both download faster and distribute loads across mirrors. A hack for sure, but with some potential. Back then public interest was non-existent, fetchcommandwrapper had some issues — e.g. metadata.xsd downloads failed and some sites rejected downloading before it made aria2 dress like wget — and I stopped using it myself, eventually. With the latest bug reports, bugfixes and release of version 0.8 in Gentoo, fetchcommandwrapper is ready for general use now. To give it a shot, you emerge app-portage/fetchcommandwrapper and append source /usr/share/fetchcommandwrapper/make.conf to /etc/portage/make.conf. Done. If you have extra options that you would like to pass to aria2c, put them in ${FETCHCOMMANDWRAPPER_EXTRA}, or ${FETCHCOMMANDWRAPPER_OPTIONS} for fetchcommendwrapper itself; for example

FETCHCOMMANDWRAPPER_OPTIONS="--link-speed=600000"

tells fetchcommandwrapper that my download link has 600KB/s only and makes aria2 in turn drop connections to mirrors that cannot keep up with at least a third of that, so that faster mirrors get a chance to take their place. For non-ebuild bugs, feel free to use https://github.com/gentoo/fetchcommandwrapper/issues to report. Best, Sebastian