Re: Bug#50284: a better apt configuration method
On Tue, 16 Nov 1999, Joey Hess wrote:
> Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > Largely this is what apt-cdrom is for, it is the intended means for
> > setting up APT for CD installation. All other people are likely best
> > served by using the default configuration until they are able to change it
> > to a suitable site.
>
> I disagree. I don't think people in australia are best served by downloading
> from http.us.debian.org.
The internet is not geographically routed. You cannot use Geography to
determine the best mirror for a location. In general many of the non-us
sites don't have large local peering arragements like you see in the US -
for instance until recently in Australia two of the big networks did not
locally peer, if you wanted to get to one from the other you needed to go
to the US and back again!
Heck, even in Canada it used to be like that 4 years ago, to go down the
street my packets went through Vancouver and Toronto!
In the majority of cases blindly picking a site by country will be worse
than using the default US site, particularly on a modem. You really need
to use something like netselect to make this feature truely usefull.
> > What is your basic autodetection? Guessing from what your script does this
> > is using /dev/cdrom - this isn't going to work. APT requires a correct
> > fstab entry to work correctly, which the new installer is going to have to
> > create. Running apt-cdrom with --no-mount is the worst possible thing you
> > can do in this situation.
> How so?
Because apt-get won't work? If apt-cdrom doesn't run correctly with out
any options then apt-get has no hope of having normal operation. APT has
to be able to mount discs on its own!
> > The way you do this is an extremely bad scheme.. If a pre-existing entry
> > is down then all new entries you try to add will mysteriosly fail!
> That's true. Hardly mysteriosly though, since you get the error message.
Since you can't seem to remove sites with your gui this kinda makes it
impossible to add new sites once one is dead.
> Wasn't aware of it. I suppose I can use it to get the location of apt.conf,
> that's the only useful information I see it providing for this program.
You need to use it to get the location of sources.list, the 'apt-get'
binary and the 'apt-cdrom' binary at least.
> > Your mime scheme didn't preserve filenames so I called one aptconf and the
> > other aptconf.templates and threw them in /tmp for testing..
> As I said (I think), you need to have debconf 0.2.33 or above.
I'm using 0.2.34
> > It runs, but
> > I think it screwed up around 5 times just while I was futzing around, I
> > never did get it to load the mirror list [yes I changed the location in
> > the script] and it insisted in writing invalid urls!
>
> Can you provide details?
Not loading the mirror list was a big one, it tried to mount the cd rom a
few times even though I never selected cdrom, it actually didn't seem to
notice when APT failed to update a site since it didn't give any message
just went back to the main screen, you know the sizes of some of your
dialogs randomly change sometimes when you visit? If you hit 'cancel' in
some of the dialogs it exits instead of logically returning to the start,
probably a few more I forget.
> I've been using and testing the script for about a month now and have seen
> no problems.
> I thought you were maintaining that file? Yes, it has consitency problems,
> like using many different names for the same country.
I'm maintaing it but I'm not linting it for correctness, someone else will
have to do that.
Jasno
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