Installing from fresh on bare metal (Sony VAIO, Core i5 Westmere, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD), latest stage 3 release from 1.4 branch (released on 2019-08-28), chroot stage of installation as per the wiki. Ego syncs fine, but emerge throws an error:
PORTAGE_BZIP2_COMMAND setting is invalid: 'bzip2'
PORTAGE_BZIP2_COMMAND setting from make.globals is invalid: 'bzip2'
command: emerge -auDN @world
As a result, emerge cannot update the system.
Approx 2 weeks ago I tried installing the 2019-07-31 release of the 1.4 branch, which installed fine, but gave me an issue with Mesa. For now, I shall revert to the 1.3 branch.