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apt-get/ apt-move



Hi, I've used apt-move to create a local debian mirror on my laptop (we
have a couple of debian "testing" laptops at work, and I have a box at
home, so a mirror makes sense for me.

I started my mirror by using apt-move move-file to populate my mirror
with all the deb's on a February Woody cd set.

Then I run apt-move sync (and now 'mirror') to bring it all up to date.

This is a lengthy process.

Especially in the early days (eg. last week, when I first got my laptop)
before my local mirror is up to date, every now and then I needed to
kill apt-move mirror so that I could apt-get install an app that I
needed right at that point.

Since I had all the (slightly old) debs in my local mirror, I wanted to
use those immediately, and later on do an apt-get dist-upgrade (when my
local mirror is up to date). I didn't want to wait, for example, for the
latest version of mozilla to download, just because apt-get update
figured out there's a newer version, when the slightly older version is
fine for what I need. But apt-get always insists, if it knows about one,
on downloading the latest version, even though:
 - my local repository has a slightly older deb
 - apt-cache show knows about the local version
 - I local Packages.gz files (courtesy apt-move) which faithfully
   represent the local list of packages
 - my sources.list file lists my local mirror dir before everything else
 - apt-get update is run and knows about everything (which is, I'm
   guessing, why apt-cache show ... gives me multiple versions for the
   package I'm about to install)

apt-get apparently has a --no-download option but this never worked for
me and produced some arcane error that made no sense to me. So I gave up
on that option.

Eventually, after much messing around and testing different things, I
did find a "cludgy" workaround:
 - comment out the "deb http..." lines in my sources.list and only leave
   in the deb file... (local) entries
 - I ended up figuring out that I could get away without running apt-get
   update after this (which would otherwise blow away the http site
   Packages files, and therefore, frustratingly, require them to be
   redownloaded after uncommenting the http lines and rerunning apt-get
   update ... grrrr ... or temporarily copying out those files and
   copying them back in and hope they haven't updated on the server -
   it's a problem because I'm behind a modem).
 - apt-get install package...
 - uncomment out the lines
 - rerun apt-move

Getting to that point of figuring all this out was frustrating. All I
wanted was for apt-get to install the slightly out of date, but local,
version of a package. Why is this so hard?

If anyone knows another way, or something I could otherwise do, it would
certainly be appreciated.

Thanks
Zenaan


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