On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 05:15:31PM -0400, Matt Zimmerman wrote: > On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 12:52:37PM +0200, Martin F Krafft wrote: > > > madison seems to be what the debian.org webpage sports as the package > > search over distributions. is it packaged? do you need someone to package > > it? > > madison requires connectivity to a Debian database which is not publicly > accessible, so it is only useful on a couple of internal Debian machines. > For this reason, it probably isn't worthwhile to package it.
I think it can be useful for those who want to create their own flavour of Debian or want to (partially) mirror Debian. dpkg-scanpackages/apt-ftparchive doesn't work very well for packages which are located in the pool, and the only way to generate correct packagelists is to put all information from all packages in a database and query that database when packagelists are generated; thus people who want to partially mirror or create their own Debian-flavour should create their own Debian database from information gathered from packagelists which are downloaded by apt. [I'm not a developer, and this is just my humble opinion.] Admar Schoonen