Bug#32595: remove obsolete and confusing acquisition methods: harddisk, mounted, cdrom, nfs

[Jules Bean <jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk>]

On 31 Jan 1999, Martin Mitchell wrote:
> 1) A m68k computer with a 60Mb debian installation. Normally I use the nfs
> method. Apt is just not feasible, it wants to copy everything over before
> it starts - there simply isn't space on the disk to do this. Also the
> runtime cost of starting dpkg on m68k is very high, so dselect is often
> much faster, rather than apt's invoking dpkg separately for many packages.
> (I am aware apt is more correct, however in practice so many invocations
> of dpkg are rarely necessary)

Hm.  I'm pretty sure the apt with a file:/ URL doesn't copy, it installs
straight from the remote.  Or is this not true?

> 2) A local mirror, hand constructed. No extra or useless packages in there.
> Apt doesn't construct or handle this type of arrangement well by default.
> The mounted method deals with this just fine.

What problems does apt give?  (I assume you're running dpkg-scanpackages
to build local packages file?)

Incidentally, I'm not claiming Martin's objections are foundless.  I'm
interested to see what limitations apt has (and then we can request them
as features).

Jules



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|  Julian Bean   | jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk        |  TW9 2TF *UK*       |
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