Re: madison

[Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>]

On Sat, Sep 22, 2001 at 04:44:46PM +0200, Admar Schoonen wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 05:15:31PM -0400, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > madison requires connectivity to a Debian database which is not publicly
> > accessible, so it is only useful on a couple of internal Debian
> > machines.  For this reason, it probably isn't worthwhile to package it.
> 
> I think it can be useful for those who want to create their own flavour of
> Debian or want to (partially) mirror Debian.
> dpkg-scanpackages/apt-ftparchive doesn't work very well for packages which
> are located in the pool, and the only way to generate correct packagelists
> is to put all information from all packages in a database and query that
> database when packagelists are generated; thus people who want to
> partially mirror or create their own Debian-flavour should create their
> own Debian database from information gathered from packagelists which are
> downloaded by apt.

There's no need for a database unless you want to maintain multiple
distributions out of cross-sections of the pool, as Debian does.  If you
only want to make a single set of packages available, or you only have one
version of each package, then you don't need to worry about it.
apt-ftparchive and dpkg-scanpackages will work fine.  It doesn't matter how
the files are arranged (in a pool-like hierarchy or section hierarchy or a
flat directory).

If you want to create your own flavour that contains different versions of
certain packages, or excludes certain packages, the situation is the same,
just with a different set of packages.  Partial mirrors should use the
Packages files on the mirrors to decide which files need to be downloaded.

Or is there a different goal you're describing that I don't understand?

-- 
 - mdz