some proposed changes/requirements for apt
Hi,
I've been pointed at you by Brad Marshall as the people maintaining
and setting the direction for APT.
I currently look after a couple of archives in australia hosting debian
and debian related archives and have run into a bit of an issue with
apt.
Basically apt doesn't have too much functionality in it (and probably
for good reason) for some of the HTTP protocol implementations, but
we'd really like to see it acquire some.
The biggest single thing for us is that apt has no ability to understand
a 302 Redirect. We are currently using rewrite rules in apache to point
people towards a lightweight web server for "large object" downloads, i.e
not web pages - iso images, zips, rpms, gz and bz2 files and we were hoping
debs.
Unfortunately apt breaks if we implement this - in fact i just realised it
broken on gz files so we've had to turn that off too - because of its
inability to follow the redirect.
Is there any chance of getting apt to offer this functionality ?
The second query we have is getting apt to have some authentication
mechanism. There seems to be no way to get apt to authenticate itself
directly against a web server (unlike wget or lynx). I realise that
it should be possible to specific a username/password as part of the
http string, but it would really be nicer if the user could simply
configure a site, login and password in a config file somewhere and
apt could look this up when it was attempting to make a connection and
fetch a file.
I'd appreciate feedback on this - hopefully i haven't made a request for
something too outrageous. If you have other ideas on how we could
deal with these issues i'd love to talk to you..
regards,
-jason
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