pkgdev manifest does not work if there is no Manifest if -d is not used

[asarubbo]

With a clean gentoo.git repository, if I'm going into the app-admin/hcloud directory I get:

~ $ pkgdev manifest ; echo $?
0

But if I'm removing the Manifest:

~ $ rm Manifest ; pkgdev manifest ; echo $?
/distfiles/hcloud-1.30.1.tar.xz: No such file or directory
/distfiles/hcloud-1.30.3.tar.xz: No such file or directory
 * failed fetching files: app-admin/hcloud-1.30.3::gentoo
pkgdev manifest: error: failed build operation: failed fetching required distfiles
2

But if I'm removing the Manifest and I pass -d it works:

~ $ rm -fr ../../distfiles/* Manifest 
~ $ pkgdev manifest -d ../../distfiles/
--2022-09-14 10:45:26--  https://dev.gentoo.org/~ago/distfiles/hcloud-1.30.1.tar.xz
Resolving dev.gentoo.org... 140.211.166.183
Connecting to dev.gentoo.org|140.211.166.183|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 1688764 (1.6M) [application/x-xz]
Saving to: '/home/ago/gentoo-x86/distfiles/hcloud-1.30.1.tar.xz'

/home/ago/gentoo-x86/distfiles/hcloud-1.30.1. 100%[================================================================================================>]   1.61M  1.66MB/s    in 1.0s    

2022-09-14 10:45:28 (1.66 MB/s) - '/home/ago/gentoo-x86/distfiles/hcloud-1.30.1.tar.xz' saved [1688764/1688764]

--2022-09-14 10:45:28--  https://dev.gentoo.org/~ago/distfiles/hcloud-1.30.3.tar.xz
Resolving dev.gentoo.org... 140.211.166.183
Connecting to dev.gentoo.org|140.211.166.183|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 1690980 (1.6M) [application/x-xz]
Saving to: '/home/ago/gentoo-x86/distfiles/hcloud-1.30.3.tar.xz'

/home/ago/gentoo-x86/distfiles/hcloud-1.30.3. 100%[================================================================================================>]   1.61M  1.66MB/s    in 1.0s    

2022-09-14 10:45:30 (1.66 MB/s) - '/home/ago/gentoo-x86/distfiles/hcloud-1.30.3.tar.xz' saved [1690980/1690980]

 * generating manifest: app-admin/hcloud::gentoo
~ $ cat Manifest 
DIST hcloud-1.30.1.tar.xz 1688764 BLAKE2B b1044a3d9e5dd28d6010763dd2c3322e56418bd2b8b48669fd2bfb4297a0a75def85a63c08f99f0bacb78bee976438af72feae2d8d38982cfc5ce2bd3a978569 SHA512 808eb06718f1e9e3ecc6de37683cc632b822e1ef9236011fba7b72ba3cd4be238c01ae66651bae304e5118d930898635116488517ca7ec3124e4bc2f987e24e6
DIST hcloud-1.30.3.tar.xz 1690980 BLAKE2B 115a6769d5bd5e6a10d812502506f9921a7659a262eea7088c88205e9fc748a570c1c9830e5061923f1be18a64d96104e6e930c9edc3316645e5d86450fbf69c SHA512 64bc692b8d098149815ba63aec8346a7f4f2ff7461fac3369343595a733a5c727b41ec8341e4eee1a98804b14bfc5a94ff9fc0621abb798d381d9bc802818b77

In short, repoman is able to understand by itself where the distfiles directory is.
Is possible to add the same behavior here?

[asarubbo]

After a bit of investigation I discovered that I can reproduce when I have in make.conf:

DISTDIR="${PORTDIR}/distfiles"
PORTDIR="/usr/portage

In the same order I written.

If I invert the order of the variables or have something like DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" make it working.

Not sure if we really want to do something here. If DISTDIR is not writable by the user that is running pkgdev, maybe it can emit a warning and create its own distdir in /tmp ?