dselect using smbmounted archive

[David Karlin <dkarlin@coloradomtn.edu>]

Hello,
I've been trying to get dselect and/or apt to work with an
official slink CD rom which is smbmounted to /mnt.

Unfortunately, the symlinks on the CD rom are not followed
by the windows server, so a "straightforward" copy of the
distribution is not available (looks for ...dists/stable...
which is actually a link to ...dists/slink...(?))

I've tried to use the access choice "mounted" with partial
success; the package listing was updated with the following
messages:
	Using '/mnt/dists/slink/main/binary-i386' as main binary dir
	Using '/mnt/dists/slink/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz' for main

After selecting packages, I chose "install" which failed
(too many errors).  Here is one of the many (identical
except for .deb name) error messages:
 subprocess dpkg-deb --control returned error exit status 2
dpkg-deb: unexpected end of file in version number in /mnt/dists/slink/main/binary-i386/admin/stow_1.3.2-11.deb
dpkg: error processing /mnt/dists/slink/main/binary-i386/admin/stow_1.3.2-11.deb (--install):
 subprocess dpkg-deb --control returned error exit status 2
Skipping deselected package sudo.

Why is dselect able to find Packages.gz, but not the .debs?
Is this some error inputting the archive location, or another
problem?  Is it possible to us a smbmounted CD rom in this way,
or do I need to find another solution?

Thanks.
-- 
David Karlin
mailto:dkarlin@coloradomtn.edu
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