Re: The Gordian Knot (was Re: Negative Summary of the Split Proposal)
My understanding was that the archive split proposal only affects the
FTP and HTTP services for downloading packages. As such, it does
nothing to promote your goal of providing an interface to only the
free packages (it only changes the URLs of the non-free ones).
It has a direct effect on what happens when people use FTP as the
interface to access the packages. That isn't the only interface, but
it is one of them (or at least it was in the past).
Are we having a misunderstanding about something? I have a feeling
that there is a misunderstanding somewhere.
nobody
new to Debian is pointed at the root directory of an FTP site (because
you'd never find the boot floppies in a million years from it).
Maybe something has changed, but I recall doing an installation by
hunting around on the ftp site for the right directory.
I think that dselect, at some point, did not make it very clear which
directories on the server were reasonable arguments to specify for
upgrading by ftp. So I had to hunt around. I think I also copied
package files to my own machine explicitly on some occasions,
after hunting around for them.
Maybe the situation is different with apt. I have very little
information about apt, little more than has appeared in the recent
discussion. Is there a a good source of information on how
apt interacts with the user--on what questions it asks?
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