Re: Outside of Debian (Re: Package splitting and upgrades)
> On Sun, 2002-03-03 at 16:40, Otto Wyss wrote:
> > Well for an outsider of Debian, it is almost impossible to get a chance.
> > Most of the time your project isn't packed and even if it is nobody
> > cares to download and use a "dpkg -i package". And with the current
> > "sources.list" it's impractical to implement an appropriate URL.
>
> This is not true at all; it took me about 15 minutes to figure out how
> to make my own. The infrastructure required for an APT repository is
> very little (almost nothing, especially if you eschew source packages).
I have no idea how you worked it out in 15 minutes. It took me
something like 3-4 hours to put 5 packages plus source into an
apt-get-able repository. It's not well documented, and it doesn't
really make sense to me.
Lots of the layout still seems odd to me. Why is there one level of
categorization, followed by division by architecture, and then a second
level of categorization? Architecture either first or last would make
more sense. Also, why does there *have* to be an override file, if I
don't want to override anything? And is it really so hard to munge the
package, instead of having this separate file?
The tools support is very limited. dpkg-scanpackages and
dpkg-scansources are okay, but they, too, took some fiddling: you have
to redirect the output to the correct filenames yourself, and you have
to combine the -all package lists into each of your
architecture-specific lists manually, for some reason. Plus you have to
arrange for them to run in each directory. Why isn't there some sort of
script around that will automatically update all the package files?
All in all it's not brain surgery, but it does take a while to work all
the details out.
-Lex
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