Re: apt 0.6 in experimental

[Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>]

On Thu, Jan 01, 2004 at 03:09:18AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 28, 2003 at 10:32:17PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> ] Origin: Nathaniel W. Turner
> ] Label: Unofficial Snapshot Packages
> 
> I'd expect the spaces there to cause problems. If they don't, I'm out of
> ideas too.

I don't think that apt cares as far as parsing the file, but I'm not sure
that the syntax of apt_preferences would allow these values to be used in
pins.

> Some rough documentation, AIUI:

Thanks!

> ] Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 18:57:17 UTC
> 
> The timestamp of the Release file, in "date -uR" format.

When I added Release file support to apt-ftparchive, I used
strftime(...,"%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S UTC") which matches what I see in the
Release files in the archive:

mizar:[~] curl -s 'http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/Release' |grep Date
Date: Thu, 01 Jan 2004 20:41:22 UTC

which is different from RFC-822 format (date -R).

> ] Architectures: alpha arm hppa i386 ia64 m68k mips mipsel powerpc s390 sparc
> ] Components: main contrib non-free
> 
> Architectures and Components this distribution includes. Multiple words, one
> for each arch/component, separated by spaces.
>
> ] Description: Debian 3.0r2 Released 20th November 2003
> 
> Human readable description. In theory this was meant to also allow for
> multiline descriptions (in the normal control-file way) that could tell
> you what the difference between unstable and stable is, for example. That
> hasn't happened so far though.

APT presently does not pay attention to these fields, fwiw.  It would be
nice if it displayed Description in some places I think, even more so for
the frontends.

-- 
 - mdz