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

[Mike Merten <ironfoot@popaccount.com>]

On Wed, Mar 24, 1999 at 11:55:47AM -0600, Mike Merten wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 24, 1999 at 11:12:37PM +1030, Mark Phillips wrote:
> > 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???
> > 
> 
> I manually edit the /usr/lib/dpkg/methods/apt/install script so that
> it moves the files to my /pub/debian directory instead of deleting
> them.  After I run install, I fire up the laptop and update it from
> there.  The only problem is, the install script gets overwritten
> after each apt upgrade...  :/
> 

How about that... I started to modify the install script again
after tonite's apt upgrade, and I noticed that it can use a
configuration file.  I created /etc/apt/apt.conf with the 
following line and it stopped deleting the downloaded files:

    APT::DSelect::Clean "never";

Now I'll have to read the apt.conf man page to see what else
I can play with ;)

Mike
-- 
Mike Merten
ironfoot@popaccount.com
ICQ# 28460680