Debian Distribution Package Maintainer v1.0

["brian (b.c.) white" <bcwhite@bnr.ca>]

Hi all!  I've been using Debian for a month or so now and thought I really
should contribute something, so...

I've written a csh utility script for managing the Debian distribution by FTP!

Here is a brief description from the built-in help...

-----
The purpose of this program is to make it easy to keep your local installation
of Linux consistent with the Debian distribution available on many FTP sites.
It does this by maintaining its own list of all the packages you have
retrieved and comparing it against the manifest on the FTP site.  Any packages
on the FTP site that differ from the installed version, as well as any
unretrieved packages are presented to you to choose from.  All selected
packages are then fetched from the FTP site and made available for you to
install.
-----


The script is available as:  ftp://ftp.bnr.ca/pub/debian

Built in help is availble by typing:

	debian  (no parameters)  - for usage information
	debian -help             - for general information

This program automates the FTP process and can even manage the Eagle Secure
Gateway (like we have here at BNR).

If anybody from BNR is reading this, you can also get it from "bcarye3a" as
"/pub/debian".  That version uses the internal "bcarye3a" machine as the
default mirror site, though the mirror won't be up until Wednesday, Sept 20th
(hopefully!).


Debian has been tested reasonably thouroughly on Linux, Solaris, and HP-UX.

If not run on a Linux machine, it will grab all the selected packages and
archive them together for transport to a linux machine.  (See "debian -help")


Problems:

There is one minor problem between my program and the distribution.  In order
for the script to properly recognize package names and version numbers from
the file names, I had to build a regular-expression to describe files.
Unfortunately, there are a few files in the distribution that do not match
this exactly.

When I ran "debian" with the "scaninst" command (see "debian -help" for more
information) on my installation at home, the following packages were not
properly found because of names that don't match the reg-ex I used
("package-name-[0-9].*\.deb") for matching package names.
 
acct            -- bad version number "-alpha-5-7" (must start with -digit)
bison-parsers   -- bad version number "-A2.3-0" (must start with -digit)
bison           -- bad version number "-A2.3-0" (must start with -digit)
diff            -- package name mismatch (file is "diffutils")
ldso            -- package name mismatch (file is "ld.so")
shellutils      -- package name mismatch (file is "sh-utils")
syslogd         -- package name mismatch (file is "sysklogd")
xpmR6           -- package case mismatch (file is "XpmR6")
 
These are the only problems I found out of the 100+ installed packages on my
machine.  I've been talking with Ian to try and get these few discrepencies
fixed.

This doesn't impact on the "correctness" of the program.  All it means is that
it might not properly recognize future package versions as "upgrades" from the
one you have installed, but rather as a completely new package.


I look forward to your comments and suggestions!

                                        Brian
                                 ( bcwhite@bnr.ca )

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    In theory, theory and practice are the same.  In practice, they're not.