Re: dselect

[John Lines <john@paladin.demon.co.uk>]

> 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.

How about permitting the 'master' point for a distribution to be a web page
which consists solely of links to other locations which would be valid top
levels.

Thus to get people started they could be pointed at www.debian.org (somewhere)
which would get them a standard distribution, there could be another nonus
starter page, and people with a more complex setup could copy a standard one
and add their own file: URLs for a CD version and for any local packages.

This would also be useful if we get anything very large, but specialised,
such as Khoros packaged - it should not be in the main distribution because
it is very big and only of interest to a few people, but for those who use
it a Debian package would be very useful.

		John Lines (who must get round to looking a Deity or whatever)


p.s. I see that Debian is not in the dictionary which exmh is using to spell
check this. Perhaps it should be ?





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