Hi, My question: Does anyone know a reason why woody or sarge programs would not be able to cope with a Packages/Sources file with a (or multiple)
Package: removals[-timestamp?] Removals: foo, bar, baz stanza embedded in it? For those of you that didn't read the debian-devel thread a short summary of http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/11/msg00790.html: I suggested a simple method of downloading only changes to Packages/Sources files by sorting the Packages/Sources files with the newest entries at the top. My suggestion also needs a tiny file listing packages that have been completly removed form the Packages/Sources file (not just updated). Steve McIntyre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote about the very same idea in his blog (http://blog.einval.com/2004/08/08#packages-files) but had the idea of adding special stanzas into the Packages/sources file to mark removals of packages. For details on how updating the Packages/Sources files then work please read the above urls. The details are not realy relevant to my question. Suffice it to say it reduces daily updates to <1% of now and allows very long gaps between updates (say up to 1 years at the cost of +50K before gzip). Now, I like the idea of having just a single file instead of downloading two files. To mark packages that are removed completly from a Packages file I thought about the following: On each day and only if there were some removals a special stanza is added at the top of the Packages file: Package: removals[-timestamp?] Removals: foo, bar, baz I tested adding such a stanza to a Packages file and using that with dselect (apt method only), apt-get and aptitude. The Packages file is parsed correctly and the special stanza is ignored. It does not show up in dselect, aptitude or apt-cache. The only sign of it I could find was with apt-get (and I consider that harmless): % sudo apt-get install removals Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done Package removals is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source E: Package removals has no installation candidate MfG Goswin
