> i have an HFS hard drive that i've downloaded stuff from the FTP mirror, and > i've mirrored it on the drive. now, i can mount it, and i can cd thru the > directories, but when i do dselect, it can't find the s/w, and i get errors.
Don't do that, then. The errors you get are from files named confusingly similar to the actual packages, in subdirectories named .resource and .finderinfo (IOW, HFS metadata crap). Since dpkg descends into every directory looking for these files (using a 'find' subprocess) you'd have to hack dkpg to omit directories named .resource or .finderinfo. When I tried that a couple of years ago I gave up due to generic dpkg build problems. Should not be too difficult with recent dpkg actually. Obvious workaround: copy the packages to a sane filesystem before use. ISO9660 qualifies, BTW. Other workaround: figure out the proper HFS mount option to omit the metadata if that's possible. Michael