apt-move questions and comments
I just used apt-move, and it went well. Thanks to all who worked on
it.
MINOR MYSTERY
I wonder if anyone can shed any light on one small problem. After the
main creation of the archive (get, move, packages) I tried to replace
one deb with a locally built one. They both have the same version
(the package is mpatrol and the locally built one works with the
current gcc and libstdc++). I got this:
# rm /usr/local/var/mirrors/debian/pool/main/m/mpatrol/mpatrol_1.4.8-6_i386.deb
wheat:/usr/local/rootlog# time apt-move movefile /usr/local/src/tools/mpatrol_1.4.8-6_i386.deb
Moving files...
Skipping files:
/usr/local/src/tools/mpatrol_1.4.8-6_i386.deb
Moving Files:
(I tried it without the rm first).
Can anyone explain why the request gets skipped? Is this an
optimization to avoid repeatedly copying the same file from cache/apt?
If I had rerun apt-move packages after rm'ing the file would it have
caught on the file was missing?
I ended up just copying over the deb in the pool; I assume that will
work.
QUESTION/SUGGESTION
Would it be possible to use links, rather than actual copies of the
debs? It seems kind of wasteful to have this stuff duplicated.
Perhaps hard or symlinks could be offered (or default to hard if on
same volume).
I can think of two possible problems with this; I'm not sure if they
motivated the original design decision. Both would apply to symlinks
only. First, if the file in cache/apt is deleted, the mirror would be
in a bogus state. Second, if the volumes got mounted in different
spots (e.g., if you had multiple systems to boot into, or some
chroots) they might fail to resolve.
It still seems to me this might be a useful option. I think apt-proxy
has a "setup from cache/apt" command that does something similar to
apt-move, but with links.
BACKGROUND
I have a single machine with multiple partitions and a slow
connection. I'm interested in using debootstrap and setting up
alternate systems and alternate chroots. apt-move seemed to be the
right tool for the job. In particular, though sharing /var/cache/apt
between different systems would suffice to avoid double downloads via
apt, debootstrap seems to require a "real" debian archive rather than
just apt's cache.
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