Re: madison

[Admar Schoonen <admar@luon.net>]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 05:15:31PM -0400, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 12:52:37PM +0200, Martin F Krafft wrote:
> 
> > madison seems to be what the debian.org webpage sports as the package
> > search over distributions. is it packaged? do you need someone to package
> > it?
> 
> madison requires connectivity to a Debian database which is not publicly
> accessible, so it is only useful on a couple of internal Debian machines.
> For this reason, it probably isn't worthwhile to package it.

I think it can be useful for those who want to create their own flavour of
Debian or want to (partially) mirror Debian. dpkg-scanpackages/apt-ftparchive
doesn't work very well for packages which are located in the pool, and the only
way to generate correct packagelists is to put all information from all packages
in a database and query that database when packagelists are generated; thus
people who want to partially mirror or create their own Debian-flavour should
create their own Debian database from information gathered from packagelists
which are downloaded by apt.

[I'm not a developer, and this is just my humble opinion.]

Admar Schoonen