Re: mirror.debian.net maintenance

[Josip Rodin <joy@entuzijast.net>]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 01:28:36PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Josip Rodin wrote:
> > Hm, yeah. I'm thinking what would be the best way to handle this selection
> > in general. The country can be autodetected remotely, but the architecture
> > can be autodetected locally. We could put your stuff at
> > <arch>.{official,unofficial}.mirror.debian.org (.net during testing),
> > and extend the sources.list(5) parser to support that somehow - we
> > could possibly use the $(ARCH) variable reference, but that seems to
> > be unavailable in the host parameter right now, and it's also ugly.
> > Instead, something like
> > 
> > deb arch+http://official.mirror.debian.org/debian stable main
> > 
> > And then it prepends the architecture string to the hostname.
> 
> sources.list already has a $(ARCH), and this already works:
> 
> deb http://$(ARCH).official.mirror.debian.org/debian stable main

I was quoting the manual page, which says:

          deb uri distribution [component1] [component2] [...]
       [...]
       distribution may also contain a variable, $(ARCH) which expands to
       the Debian architecture (i386, m68k, powerpc, ...) used on the
       system. This permits architecture-independent sources.list files to
       be used. In general this is only of interest when specifying an exact
       path, APT will automatically generate a URI with the current
       architecture otherwise.

But anyway, that doesn't solve the problem of $(ARCH) being ugly.
It's not only uglier than the current default settings, but it also breaks
the existing (good) practice of automated architecture handling described
above, and it would really be asking for trouble if people would start
typing it over.

-- 
     2. That which causes joy or happiness.