Re: Netscape 7.0
On Sat, Oct 19, 2002 at 11:30:53PM -0400, Andy Saxena wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 20, 2002 at 03:32:19AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > Sorry, it requires accessing the archive's package database directly so
> > you need to have an account on ftp-master.debian.org for it to work. (In
> > other words, I'm cheating. :)) You can use http://packages.debian.org/
> > though.
>
> Am I right in assuming that a commoner has no such tool available to
> him?
I don't know of one. Colin Walters was trying to write a CORBA interface
to the central database, which would allow this to be made available.
> I don't deal in architectures other than x86. Not yet, anyway. However,
> is it safe to assume that packages that are not inherently architecture
> dependent are available for all architectures?
That depends what you mean by "not inherently architecture dependent".
Generally, all released architectures have to have a pretty good
coverage of packages: see http://buildd.debian.org/stats/ for a rough
idea of how well they're keeping up with unstable. All the same, there
are sometimes packages which on the face of it don't look all that
architecture-dependent but just fail to build on some architectures for
one reason or another. This usually gets filed as a bug.
If a package contains no architecture-dependent code at all, of course,
such as a package consisting only of Perl code, the way the archive is
organized means that it's automatically available for all architectures.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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