On Mon, 2002-03-25 at 03:05, Noah Sombrero wrote: > On 24 Mar 2002 20:18:18 +0000, you wrote: > > > >Do I understand that you want apt to detect when space is short on the > >target device, and automatically generate symlinked mount points on > >available devices with sufficient space? > > > >If you've got such devices within the system, LVM makes more sense. > > > No, I would just like to be able to specify an alternative destination in > the configuration somehow. Do you mean in the same way as "rpm --relocate foo.rpm" ? > Another person suggested that it is possible to configure apt to store > downloaded files at an alternative destination by editing apt.conf. > This is true. But there is more. > > 1) There needs to be an environmental variable pointing to apt.conf Why would you want to move this file? > 2) You will need to edit a couple of perl scripts. I suppose this could be automated. > 3) You will need to specify an admindir. There are several places this > could go: dpkg.cfg, apt.conf, dselect.cfg. Nope, the only way that > works is to use the command line version "dselect --admindir /foo/bar." > You can, of course, automate this with a little shell script file. > 4) When you move the admin directory, two things need to stay, the > alternatives dir under /var/lib/dkpg and the a copy of the status file. > This copy of the status file is not used. It just needs to be there. > > Number four makes me think that the process has not been completely > thought out. The other thing is, why isn't this procedure spelled out? > All OS's from MS to Apple to Linux put their users through the mysterious > configuration exercise repeatedly. There is a place for an OS that > does not do this. Who wants to be the next one to have 70 billion > dollars? Perhaps this problem is substantially harder than it first appears. I still, after all these posts, do not understand the substantial benefit that your scheme would bring. Very-end-users don't want to be asked anything - they just want their packages to be installed and icons to appear. This is what I thought you were after - transparent use of disk space, wherever it is within the system. You don't seem to want this. Advanced users who would want to relocate packages could do it themselves. Regards Peter. -- Peter Whysall peter.whysall@ntlworld.moc The TLD in my email address is sdrawkcab. Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 sid -- kernel 2.4.18
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