Use apt to form a partial local mirror of Slink -- how?

[Mark Phillips <mark@ist.flinders.edu.au>]

I have installed Slink on my desktop using apt.  It downloaded a whole
lot of package files to do this (but dselect, I think, has now deleted
them).

Now I have a laptop which needs to be upgraded to Slink.  It would
appear that I'm going to have to download all these files again!

What would be nice is to have the option for apt to build up a partial
mirror of the Slink distribution (or any version for that matter),
putting each downloaded file in the correct location in a directory
tree.  Of course it would only be a partial mirror because it would
only download those packages which were to be installed.

The advantage of this is that I could then use this structure to
install from when upgrading my laptop.  This solution would be better
than the standard mirror solution because this way, only the files
needed would be downloaded, saving on disk space and internet
bandwidth.

My guess is that apt doesn't currently have this feature.  Are there
any plans to add it?

My second best option is to use nfs to symlink the laptop's
/var/cache/apt/archives to the desktop's.  This might work --- the
only problem here is that dselect-apt decides to delete all the files
in the cache!  How can I turn this off???

Cheers,

Mark.



_/~~~~~~~~\___/~~~~~~\____________________________________________________
____/~~\_____/~~\__/~~\__________________________Mark_Phillips____________
____/~~\_____/~~\________________________________mark@ist.flinders.edu.au_
____/~~\HE___/~~\__/~~\APTAIN_____________________________________________
____/~~\______/~~~~~~\____________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________
        "They told me I was gullible ... and I believed them!"