On Sat, 23 Jan 1999, Dale Scheetz wrote: > > Of course this is not at all true, the package files are generated > > directly from the .deb files daily they are never wrong, if they were then > > our tools would stop working! > > While what you say is in principle true, in practice it doesn't always > work out that way. My experience has been that many problems experienced > by our users, and much of the fault on "broken" CDs have been the result > of out-of-sync Packages files. In my most recent personal case, that > broken sync was caused by a broken mirror configuration WRT symlinks. The > result was a package in the Packages file but not in the archives. This > can happen through a chain of mirrors in several ways. (Yes, I know that > there are safeguards to help, but they are not always used)
There is a simpler solution to this as used by the apt-cdrom tool, we simply verify that the package files are correct for the media they describe. If an entry exists there is a 99% chance that it is actually correct. Mind you this process takes a long time, but I think it is worth it as it makes our CD installs virtually fool proof Jason
