operating in non-standard directories

["Martin Bialasinski" <martin@internet-treff.uni-koeln.de>]

Hi,

for my work on the boot floppies, I want to use apt to fetch the
Packages file for the different archs (and also to unfold and check
the dependancies for a package on the different archs). I don't want
to delete the files, when working with the different archs, herefore,
I use different data directories.

$ cat apt.conf.alpha
APT
{
  Architecture "alpha";
}

Dir
{
  Etc "." {
    sourcelist "sources.list";
  }
  State "state-alpha" {
  } 
  Cache "cache-alpha" {
  }
}

If I then do a "apt-get -c apt.conf.alpha update", the Packages file
is successfully fetched, but it is not copied from the partial
directory to the lists directory, and is just deleted from the partial 
directory :-(

Get:1 http://ftp1.us.debian.org potato/main Packages [678kB]
Hit http://ftp1.us.debian.org potato/main Release                              
Err http://ftp1.us.debian.org potato/main Packages                             
  Could not open file /lists/partial/ftp1.us.debian.org_debian_dists_potato_main_binary-alpha_Packages - open (2 No such file or directory)
Fetched 678kB in 1m36s (7011B/s)                                               
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
W: Couldn't stat source package list 'http://ftp1.us.debian.org potato/main Packages' (state-alpha/lists/ftp1.us.debian.org_debian_dists_potato_main_binary-alpha_Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these missing files
E: Some index files failed to download, they have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

Afterwards, the directory looks like this:

cache-alpha:
total 469
-rw-r-----   1 root     root       507962 Sep 10 01:54 pkgcache.bin
-rw-r-----   1 root     root         8528 Sep 10 01:54 srcpkgcache.bin

state-alpha:
total 1
drwxr-x---   3 root     root         1024 Sep 10 02:24 lists/

state-alpha/lists:
total 2
-rw-r-----   1 root     root           96 Jan 16  1999 ftp1.us.debian.org_debian_dists_potato_main_binary-alpha_Release
-rw-r-----   1 root     root            0 Sep 10 02:23 lock
drwxr-x---   2 root     root         1024 Sep 10 02:24 partial/

state-alpha/lists/partial:
total 0
-rw-r-----   1 root     root            0 Sep 10 02:24 ftp1.us.debian.org_debian_dists_potato_main_binary-alpha_Packages.decomp


Could you tell me how to fix this?

Ciao,
	Martin