[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Problem understanding/using dpkg-scanpackages



Zenaan Harkness wrote:
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


I followed your work flow.
I was able to install,using synaptic, two applications - wine and zork:
   1. wine because I actually need it
   2. zork because at least some of the files were on the last DVD

Although everything seemed to function correctly, some of the details were not as I expected.

When installing the applications, they did not authenticate although they came from distribution DVD's. In a previous round of my experiments wine had installed properly when following normal procedures for installing from CD/DVD.

Also, during installation of both wine and zork Synaptic paused requesting that the 1st DVD of the distribution be installed. Long term that is not acceptable as my eventual goal is "DVD free" application installations.

Also I noted your procedure did not copy the "dists" directory from the DVDs nor mention distribution name nor whether applications were from main or contrib.

As my test machine has had many strange things done it in the last couple of months, I'll wipe the hard drive and do a clean normal install. The current Debian isn't even close to typical - I'm working on multiple projects with conflicting goals. Due to outside constraints I'm working with Squeeze 6.0.5. I've the Wheezy DVDs and will do a setup with them later.

Thank you for your assistance.
I've got some reading to do.







Reply to: