Re: First post to list: Make .deb archive available to dselect?

["David Z. Maze" <dmaze@MIT.EDU>]

Robin Collins <robin.c.collins@cwcom.net> writes:
RC> I've recently started using Debian after some time with SuSE and
RC> am finding lots about Debian I like better, not the least is
RC> dpkg/dselect/apt.

Welcome aboard!  :-)

RC> One thing I've done is to accumulate a number of updated packages
RC> off the Web which replace those on the potato CD.  I now want to
RC> re-install on a second machine from scratch and wonder how I can
RC> have dselect recognise the accumulated .debs.  As far as I can see
RC> I need to create a Package.gz for dselect's benefit but don't
RC> really know where to look for information on how to do this.

There are a couple of ways to do this.  One is to connect the new
machine to the network directly, and add the relevant URLs to your APT
sources.list.

You could also create an archive of only those packages you actually
want to install.  It should be laid out more or less like the real
Debian archive: you should have a dists directory, and under that a
directory for the name of your "distribution", under that another
directory with the name of a particular area of the distribution, and
under that binary-* directories for architectures you support.  For
example:

/usr/local/debian
  dists
    local
      main
        binary-i386
          foo.deb
          bar.deb
          (etc.)

(The analog to "local" in Debian would be "stable", "testing",
"unstable", or a distribution name; the analog to "main" would be
"main", "contrib", or "non-free".)

You then need to run dpkg-scanpackages to build a Packages file.  I
believe it's in the dpkg-dev package, but my Debian machine just fell
off the net so I can't tell you exactly what's involved.  It has a man 
page, which is reasonably informative.

Finally, you'd add to your /etc/apt/sources.list an entry like

deb /usr/local/debian local main

which would tell APT where the files are.  Run 'apt-get update;
apt-get install package1 package2 ...' to do the work of installation.

TODO: learn more about tools like apt-move and describe how they'd
help with this particular situation.  (And make my gateway machine not
break horribly when DHCP renumbering happens; right now the firewall
rules don't change, so it effectively can't talk to the outside world
at all...)

-- 
David Maze             dmaze@mit.edu          http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell