Re: Bundling .debs (in a .deb?)
Steve Traugott wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Does anyone know of any existing tool which bundles a .deb package,
> and its prerequisite packages, and its related debconf db deltas, into
> a single archive? The resulting archive might be a tar.gz, zip, or
> even another .deb...
>
> It might be useful to think of this in terms of encapsulating the
> results of a given 'apt-get install foo' or 'apt-get upgrade', so that
> the same actions can be "replayed" later on similar machines. (For
> reasons why you might want the same actions replayed on other machines
> rather than whatever apt-get decides to do at some later point in
> time, see http://www.infrastructures.org/papers/turing/turing.html.
> Specifically, the technique described in section 7.3.1.1 just now blew
> up on our machines when woody upgraded -- the available packages all
> changed. We're running apt-proxy, but have multiple locations, and
> the problem of keeping the apt-proxy caches consistent between
> locations makes the machine builds too fragile, too dependent on
> environment.)
I may be wrong, but capturing debconf questions + answers and
encapsulating .debs in one large file would only work on exactly
similar configured and setup machines. However, in such a case, you
could simply execute apt-get install foo on all such machines with the
same results. Hence, a large file won't be required.
However, if you need to install .deb files from date-XXX later when
packages were replaced by more recent or security fixed versions of
those packages, the above won't work. In that case, why not use
snapshot.debian.net for snapshots?
If that's not an option either, a small script that parses and handles
the output of apt-get --print-uris -y install foo and fetches the .deb
files and stores them in one .tar or directory, sound quite easy and
sufficient for me.
Regards,
Joey
--
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