Re: an idea for next generation APT archive caching

[Jonathan Oxer <jon@ivt.com.au>]

On Fri, 2004-10-22 at 13:43 +1000, Paul Hampson wrote:

> Is there anything such a system would want to fetch from a Debian
> mirror that doesn't show up in Packages.gz or Sources.gz?

Yes, lots of things as I found out the hard way when I implemented
object type checking in apt-cacher - even plain old .tar.gz if you want
people to be able to fetch sources. Not good from a "don't use this as a
general purpose relay" standpoint! The current checks in apt-cacher look
like this:

if ($filename =~ /(\.deb|\.rpm|\.dsc|\.tar\.gz|\.diff\.gz|\.udeb)$/) {
...
} elsif ($filename =~ /(Packages.gz|Release|Sources.gz)$/) {
...
} else {
etc.

(It's trapping the Packages.gz etc files separately because you can't
just cache them directly: you'd have namespace collisions all over the
shop. They have to be stored separately in the cache based on the
requested host, distro etc and then the names mapped back again when
another request comes in).

Cheers  :-)

Jonathan