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Bug#1041993: is URIs supposed to be a list?



On Tue, Jul 25, 2023 at 02:27:40PM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> Is this supposed to be a list?

Yes.

> What would be the semantics of multiple URIs given there?

Counter question, what is the semantics of "Suites" or "Components"?
Concurrent, round-robin, first answering wins?

Not sure what the first means, but at least the later two make no
sense for those, right? Unsurprisingly the behaviour doesn't magically
change for other fields… why should it? Behaving differently depending
on how you write things down would be a nightmare to document; nobody
would read or even understand it!


So, you can e.g. write:

| deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian stable main
| deb http://ftp.se.debian.org/debian stable main

as:

| Types: deb
| URIs:
|  http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian
|  http://ftp.se.debian.org/debian
| Suites: stable
| Components: main

Does it make sense? For most people, probably not – hence the man page
doesn't include an example for pulling data from two different mirrors.
I suppose with cdrom and http this would make a tiny bit of sense, but
not everything than can be done should be done. You could use it for
PPAs or the mythical Debian bikesheds, but given Signed-By would be
a good idea for those it might not be as useful there either.


If you want "concurrent" downloads and "fallbacks" and what not have
a look at apt-transport-mirror(1). Perhaps one day an URIs alternative
might exist which behaves similar to a mirror-light – but that will be
a complicated sell documentation wise as one-line- and deb822-style are
less interchangeable as a result.


As you are basically asking for making a man page more complex by
providing examples for something hardly anyone will be using (and
probably misunderstand if an example is provided without explanation),
I am closing with a veto as that seems not nearly important enough to
clutter up the bug list with a wontfix.


Best regards

David Kalnischkies

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