Getting dselect and apt-* to work from a local file system
I have been trying to get package management going since I installed Debian
a couple of weeks ago, but have had great difficulties. I am unable to
connect to the Internet from my Linux partition, so I decided to set up
apt-setup to use a file system and get everything set up so that I would
only have to download packages onto my Windows partition and transfer them
to the appropriate place in Linux and be able to install them. Since using a
local file%20system isn't the most documented topic in the Debian world, I
had to learn the hard way to create /dists/stable/***/binary-i386
directories with the same Package files in them that are on the online
mirrors, where *** is main, contrib, and non-free. I also transferred the
Release files for each of those directories and for /dists/stable in order
to get some "Ign file:" messages to disappear. After all that, I have
reached a problem that I have no clue regarding the solution to. When I run
dselect, the first option goes fine, but when it comes time for the second
option, Update, I get the following:
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Merging Available Information
Replacing available packages info, using /var/cache/apt/available.
dpkg: parse error, in file '/var/cache/apt/available' near line 600 package
'navigator':
duplicate value for user-defined field 'meta-package'
update available list script returned error exit status 2.
Press <enter> to continue.
What in the world does that mean? Whatever it is, I am not generating that
file to start with, dselect/apt-get is, so I don't know what's going on.
I've tried just about everything to try to find out what this means,
including but not limited to looking through most of the documentation on
the Debian site multiple times, searching the web with Google and ProFusion,
looking at the source code for dpkg, writing my own little program to find
every occurrence of lines that start with "meta-package" in the entire file
(which still doesn't quite report line numbers correctly, but that's another
matter), searched through the Debian mailing list archives many, many times,
and probably a bunch of other stuff but apparently I'm the first person in
world history to experience this, judging by how I haven't even been able to
find a single mention anything that relates to this. Can anyone help me? I
want to use dselect, not dpkg directly or anything else. After spending
weeks trying to get this one aspect of the system to work properly I'm about
out of nerves. If no one on this list is able to help I will most likely
just use a different distribution, since I really have no clue what it's
problem with the meta-package tag is. I'm not changing the file around, it's
just whining about it's own file. Any help will be most deeply appreciated.
I really, really want to remain with Debian, but if I can't get it to work I
don't really have much of an option.
Tommy McDaniel
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