Re: package lists for older machines
On Tue, Dec 18, 2001 at 04:32:40PM -0400, Ben Armstrong wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 18, 2001 at 03:21:58PM -0500, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > This would not be too difficult to implement. Probably the easiest way
> > would be to for you to just set up a partial mirror which contains only
> > the packages that you feel fit this category, and make this mirror
> > available to others.
>
> That adds quite a lot of unnecessary overhead. How about a filter
> inserted into apt-get update which selects (either by inclusion or
> exclusion) a subset of the packages (and everything that depends on those
> packages, I guess) and rewrites the Packages file(s) accordingly? Such
> filters could be written (possibly using grep-dctrl) based on whatever
> criteria those with special needs have. Sure, you still have to download
> the whole Packages file first, but it's still orders of magnitude easier
> than managing an entire partial mirror.
If the number of packages is much smaller than the entire distribution, the
overhead is not so great. Making a one-shot partial mirror would actually
be easier, if there were multiple machines involved. You could certainly
mangle the packages files instead, though you'll have to fool apt into
thinking that it has the complete one, else it will continually try to
replace it with the correct version.
The "and their dependencies" part makes it a nontrivial mangling, too. What
about logical-OR dependencies and virtual packages?
--
- mdz
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