Re: Problem understanding/using dpkg-scanpackages

[Zenaan Harkness <zen@freedbms.net>]

On 11/7/13, Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> wrote:
> I purchase complete DVD sets.
> I am doing multiple clean installs to determine my "optimum"
> solution.
> Shuffling DVDs became a pain. I set aside a partition for myown
> repository.
> I copied the /dists and /pool directories from all DVDs in the
> distribution set to that partition - it is mounted as
> /media/repo6.

OK, here's a test I just ran, which seems to work, as I'll show below.

It is my understanding that, for your purposes of an offline mirror
created by simply dumping the contents of the various DVDs that you
have, you only need the "pool" directories.

First, to emulate your DVD pool scenario, I copied a subset of
pool/..., the "z" directory from my pool/main/ directory, to a
temporary location:
mkdir /media/repo6
cp -r /my/full/mirror/pool/main/z /media/repo6
cd /media/repo6
mkdir -p pool/main
mv z pool/main

In your case, you would for each DVD insert and copy off the files
something like as follows:
cp -rf /media/cdrom/debian/pool /media/repo6

Next, I ran the following command (many warnings are produced):
dpkg-scanpackages . | gzip - > Packages.gz

Note that I am still in the /media/repo6 directory.

Next I added the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list, commenting
out all other lines in that file:
deb file:/media/repo6 ./

Finally I ran the following command:
apt-get update

and got this output:
Ign file: ./ InRelease
Ign file: ./ Release.gpg
Ign file: ./ Release
Ign file: ./ Translation-en_AU
Ign file: ./ Translation-en
Reading package lists... Done


So, using this procedure, seems to work for me. In the past, I have
used this same procedure, using the DVD set, as you are using, and it
works just fine.

Good luck
Zenaan