Re: Suggestion

[Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca>]

On Mon, 9 Nov 1998, Sarel Botha wrote:

> Hi
> 
> I think you guys are doing a great job with APT. I'm not able to use APT all
> the time though. I have a LAN and a dial-up (local calls aren't free). I
> want to be able to share the packages I download with other people on the
> LAN. At the moment I'm using ftp which works quite well, even keeping the
> directory structure, so I only need to keep the Packages.gz files on my
> computer up to date, other people can then effectively get the files from my
> computer after I downloaded them from Debian mirrors. I also noticed that
> http mirrors are quite a lot faster than ftp but sadly I can't use the ftp
> method for http.
> 
> Couldn't you guys develop a small add-on that makes APT keep the files
> downloaded even after installed, in the same structure as on the Debian
> mirrors, including the Packages.gz files?

Edit /usr/lib/dselect/methods/apt and remove the clean call.

As for your other needs, I generally do something like this:
 1) All machine have http access to the 'net via a squid proxy
 2) All machines NFS mount /var/cache/apt/archives
 3) Any machine can download a file and if it has already been download
    then it will already be in the cache and not downloaded again
 4) Occasionaly erase the cache or somesuch.

Jason