Re: Outside of Debian (Re: Package splitting and upgrades)

["Lex Spoon" <lex@cc.gatech.edu>]

Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> wrote:

> I'd say 30 minutes with sources.list(5), dpkg-scanpackages(1) and
> dpkg-scansources(1), or 10 minutes with (groups.)google.com, eg. it
> is documented (in German) in the debian-user-german-FAQ
> http://www.sylence.de/dudfaq/ _if_ you want to publish only for one
> architecture and can live with a flat directory-layout. You do not
> need to separate binary-all and binary-{i386,arm, ...} and component
> in apt sources.list is optional, too:

I tried sources.list, apt-get, and apt immediately, without much help. 
It took me a while to discover the existence of scanpackages and
scansources, and those manpages presuppose a good understanding of the
directory layout.  I did use google after a few minutes of it, and was
suprised I couldn't find any official-seeming documentation on the
layout.  Finally I found this HOWTO:

	http://ibiblio.org/gferg/ldp/giles/repository/repository.html

It's very hands-on, and isn't helpful in finding what the real rules
are.  I largely copied what they suggest.  It still didn't help with the
-all issue -- I guess this guy doesn't distribute any platform-neutral
packages.

On your last sentence, let me make sure I understand.  I don't have to
put non-US (and whatever else) at the top level?  I could just start
with binary-all and binary-i386?   The guy who wrote the above HOWTO
didn't seem to realize that, and I didn't even think to try some
different arrangement.  How would you specify an sources.list line with
no components?  Anyway, this is a minor point -- the standard
repositories are set up like this, presumably for some reason I don't
yet fathom, and the only reason the confusion mattered was because I was
trying to reverse engineer the layout.


Junichi Uekawa <dancer@netfort.gr.jp> wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Mar 2002 02:17:38 -0400 
> "Lex Spoon" <lex@cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> 
> > 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?
> 
> I have a script which does:
> 
> dpkg-scanpackages . . | tee Packages | gzip -9 > Packages.gz
> dpkg-scansources . . | tee Sources | gzip -9 > Sources.gz

Additionally I had to deal with -all.  Not only does this mean multiple
invocations are required, but it means that the -all list has to be
combined into the main list manually.  (And if I ever find a way to
compile on other architectures, to combine it with the list for each
architecture in turn.)  I don't understand why apt doesn't download -all
automatically, and it took me a while to debug why this was happening.


Things that would have helped me a lot:

	- An official document somewhere that describes what the apt tools will
be looking for.  I'm getting the impression that the exact directory
layout is a little flexible, but I'd still like to know what the
requirements are.

	- There should be an existing tool that runs all the correct
scanpackages and scansources commands for a standard directory layout. 
(also, there should be a standard layout, just to allow such a tool to
exist.).



-Lex