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anna and Release files



Tollef and I have been discussing what to do with Release files. The
current state of anna is that it tries
  main/debian-installer/binary-$(ARCH)/Packages*
  local/debian-installer/binary-$(ARCH)/Packages*
This is suboptimal. :)

There are a few problems with getting this information from Release
files though.

* First of all, not all media will have Release files. A floppy will
rarely have a Release file for example. This means that either anna will
have to handle missing Release files, or retrievers will have a command
for fetching or (in the case of floppy-retriever) creating a Release
file (like floppy-retriever generates a Packages file from udpkg -f)

* The Release file is in  dists/$(SUITE)/Release  and the paths in it
are relative to  dists/$(SUITE).  The udeb paths in Packages files are
all relative to the "root" of the retriever area, whereas the Release
file's paths will be relative to "root"/dists/$(SUITE).

These two points can be solved fairly easily in at least two ways.

* Let the retriever worry about the Release files. There will only be a
'packages' command to the retrievers. It's up to the retriever to figure
out which Packages files to include. The retriever will merge them into
the location where anna will find a single Packages file to parse.

* Let the 'packages' command take a path argument, relative to
dists/$(SUITE). We'd ask for e.g.
  net-retriever packages main/debian-installer/binary-$(ARCH)/Packages
but for floppy-retriever this is a moot point since there will only be
one Packages file (which is actually generated) and no Release file.
Should the Release file be generated, or just skipped?


A bigger problem is how to determine *which* paths in the Release file
are related to d-i! :) grep for 'debian-installer'? Ick!


Any suggestions?


/Martin

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