Re: Thoughts about some new approx features ...

[Eric Cooper <ecc@cmu.edu>]

On Sat, Nov 11, 2006 at 10:09:38AM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> I just used approx to help me doing test installation with d-i.
> 
> During this, there are 3 features, which i think may be useful :
> 
> - ability to have approx take packages from more than one archive to put
>   them in the same repository.
> 
>   This would allow to easily override the standard debian d-i .udebs, and
>   make development of d-i much easier. Especially, since d-i doesn't support
>   more than one .udeb repository right now.

Can you explain the desired semantics of this?  Would this be like a
search list (first one found), or union (most recent version among
all), or something else?

> - an option to automatically limit the approx archive to a given size, with
>   an least-used or oldest removal algorithm.
> 
>   This would allow to not care about approx.gc, and would allow to let
>   approx be running without having to think about it, and check that it will
>   not eat the disk.
> 
>   Maybe something like the auto-clean feature of apt would be nice too ? It
>   does keep only the latest version of all packages. Maybe something where
>   we keep only packages accessible by the diverse Packages files from each
>   repository ? 

That's exactly what gc_approx does -- removes everything not
reachable from the Packages/Sources files.  Couldn't you just make it
run more frequently (default is cron.weekly, but you could make it
daily or hourly ...)

>  - Is there some way to control the syslog output, or to move the log into a
>    /var/log/approx rotated log thingy ? Using approx intesively sure does
>    file up the syslog quickly :)

I can add a "quiet" mode that doesn't log anything unless there's some
error condition (or maybe that should be the default, with a "verbose"
mode instead?)

Thanks for the suggestions.

-- 
Eric Cooper             e c c @ c m u . e d u