Re: Sources vs Packages files
On Thu, Apr 19, 2001 at 01:19:32PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 05:52:26PM +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 02:09:32AM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> > > 2. in the main archive
> > > Well, er, define "main".
> > "unstable/main" of some architecture is the content of
> > ROOT/dists/unstable/main/binary-ARCH/Packages
>
> That's not particularly true, and is certainly the wrong way around.
So what is the correct definition in your opinion?
> dists/*/main/binary-*/Packages{,.gz,.bz2} is the list of packages that are
> available to be installed on a Debian system.
That's a different term. I do not talk about packages available to be
installed on a Debian system. I talk about a special architecture
and a special "distribution", or in the terms of apt sources list,
a "distribution component".
> We're now providing (or soon will be, depending on your perspective)
> a really minimal package based distribution for doing installs of the
> real Debian system. These packages aren't suitable for installation into
> a real Debian system, and they're not meant to be; so putting them into
> main/binary-*/Packages* is just asking for users to break their systems
> in random ways. This has been discussed on this list in the past.
Joey took one further step and says that they are not even Debian packages.
Obviously not-Debian packages are not suited for installation on a Debian
system "automatically".
> If you want to get all the packages that can be built from main/sources
> for an architecture, you have to cat these Packages files together, and
> cope with the fact that some of them may be udebs. If we ever introduce
> another distribution that's completely disjoint from the above two,
> you might have to cat a third Packages file together. *shrug*
I assert you that I am completely aware of this possible work around for the
current situation.
But I am very astonished that everybody seems to be satisfied with this
situation. We don't know if non-Debian packages can provide a Packages file
that is parseable by conventional tools. udebs do, is this just luck?
Also, I prefer software that is reliable and works without changes in
unknown environments. To do this, I have to take special precautions
in case a debian-installer area (or others) does not exist. Also,
there is no interface to get the current list of such directories.
Why not provide a way to fetch such, so that we can write our
software once and forget about it?
> > People often say that Debian strives fro technical excellence. I can't see
> > technical excellence in the introduction of the debian-installer
> > subdirectory. I raised this issue because I think we can do better.
>
> Sure we can. But the problem here isn't that the structure of the archive
> is wrong, it's that the autobuilders haven't been particularly well
> organised and consistent across architectures.
This is the wrong way around. Sure, if you force a central software on all
ports, you just have to fix this software to make it work for everyone.
But first, that doesn't mean that the imperfection went away, it is just
less visible, and second, I hope forcing the same software on everyone is
not what you want to achieve. I have good reasons on the choice of
software I use.
> If you want to keep maintaining hurd separately, you'll
> have to adapt yourself to the archive rather than it getting done for
> you along with all the other architectures.
I have no problems adopting myself to changes. I have problems with bad
changes which require more or less ugly hacks. I point them out to make
Debian and our software in general better. If this is not what you want,
then I'll shut up and work on my software instead. But don't try to make it
look as if the problem lies elsewhere.
I am not incapable of adding an ugly hack to my software just for Debian ftp
archives. I am just unhappy.
Marcus
"Man kann niemanden zu seinem Glück zwingen." -- anonymous proverb
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