Request for comments: a "Debian System Method" for dpkg Because of its owner having forgotten the debian-CD in a train, I recently had to install a debian system on a PC. We still had the installation floppies we had used for another machine on the same ethernet, and had access to that machine, which had a dpkg-repack. So I repacked the needed packages, moved repacked netstd to the new system with a floppy :-( and the others with FTP, and installed them by hand. No need to say I forgot some dependencies, and had to repeat these steps several times with missing packages... That left me some time to think about that:
* an automated version of what I was doing would have been interested, but here, the situation was an exceptional one... * anyway, for a network of debian machines, we could arrange to have only one machine installing/upgrading by FTP, and the others installing/upgrading from that one without it having to waste disk space with all already installed deb files. * a full repackaging might not be necessary, as it is time-consuming on "slow" machines (I'm speaking here about a P75 !) for large packages (multi-megabytes ones), but it should at least partially be done. * packages descriptions (those from Packages files) should be made available from one machine to another (I don't think they are kept as-is after install, so they would have to be rebuild, at least partially). * I see 2 different solutions: - NFS-mount the source machine, and execute all on the target machine. That's only realistic if NFS maps root on target to root on source, and that might not be always the case. - dialog between the 2 machines: this makes the source machine execute programs (build description, repack), so maybe a daemon process would be interesting, for security reasons. * conffiles would have to be handled correctly: maybe default conffiles should be always kept (*.dpkg-dist), and repack should be able to recognize them (with md5 ?). etc., probably... -- Yann Dirson e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://monge.univ-mlv.fr/~dirson -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
