Question of possible APT use, without root access, to use different sources
Hello,
I have the following situation: a host machine, which I don't have any
privileged access to.
In this host machine, a virtual environment is run, but it do not have
Internet access (the host has it).
The host machine runs an OS that I don't fully control. But today it has
an Ubuntu (it will probably at least stay with a Debian derivative, or
change for Debian itself, and this can be counted for a longer time).
The virtual machine has a Debian right now, and now we're getting to the
reason I'm writing to you, the APT Development Team.
I want to install new programs in my virtual Debian. With apt-get I can
easily install some simpler packages that do not have many uninstalled
dependencies, or no "hard ones" at all. But yesterday I tried to install
gcc... and the list of dependencies is longer, so manually installing
each of them is not really fun.
The aim now is to use the Internet available in the host machine to
download every package needed. After that, installing them, is easy
enough for me. But, since I don't have root access to it, I cannot
change the sources.list (and this would affect many other users, so it
is a second reason for not doing it). What I want is to configure a
local sources.list (e.g., similar to ~/.apt/sources.list) and have
apt-get to download the packages only from repositories in this file.
Could you help me to patch the apt source code to have this change? For
a quick solution, a pointer to where is chooses the
/etc/apt/sources.list can be enough; I would compile and run it locally,
easily (maybe it's possible, please confirm this to me).
A final observation, just for the curious around here: the fact that my
virtual environment does not use the host's Internet is a practical
limitation of UML (User Mode Linux), in the setup without root I have
now. Maybe in a few days or weeks this changes, but I really think that
apt-get (and other apt tools) could have an easier escape for this
situation.
Regards,
--
Balaco
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