Re: dselect

[Drake Diedrich <Drake.Diedrich@anu.edu.au>]

On Wed, 25 Mar 1998, Tim Sailer wrote:

> Just curious.. are we going to set up links, or fix dselect, to make
> dselect look at the 'dists' tree now? It's a real PITA for new users
> to have to know the whole path for the files, like 
> dists/stable/main/binary-i386 . This is *not* the way to win over
> users.

   If this is a reference to dpkg-http's behavior, then I have no plans to
reduce the flexibility of the package to allow only dists/stable/... style
archives, or to hide the structure of the archive from the user.  The
current method is simple: the site, each distribution, and /Packages.gz
are concatenated together to form the complete URL of each Packages.gz
file.  The site and each file listed in Packages.gz are concatenated to
form the URLs of each .deb file.
   Only the main Debian distribution has the dists/stable/... structure. 
The main distribution structure is given in the setup examples, and is the
default the first time through setup, but it must be configurable.
non-US, bo, bo-unstable, private archives, disks where the user has
downloaded the real directories and not the symlinks, third party derived
distributions, ... all have different setups. 
   If you have specific suggestions for changes to the interface that
won't cripple this flexibility I'd like to hear them, but it's probably
too late for a major overhaul, and Apt will most likely be available in
the next release.
   An archive could easily be constructed with a single Packages.gz file
for all three (or four, counting non-US) distributions, so that the user
could type in a much simpler distributions line.  This would be up to the
ftp/http site maintainer or CDROM packager.  A single-architecture CD
could place a single Packages.gz at the root level of the CDROM and Access
configuration would be simple. 

-Drake

--
Dr. Drake Diedrich, Research Officer - Computing, (02)6279-8302
John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University 0200
Replies to other than Drake.Diedrich@anu.edu.au will be routed off-planet


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