For some time I've had a partial mirror of debian. Partial being the slink distribution and only the binary-i386 directories. It's worked well and greatly eased upgrading the machines I have Debian installed on. Recently I decided to start mirroring potato instead of slink. I thought it would be easy but I thought wrong. Apparently something has changed and I can no longer "flatten" symbolic links with the mirror utility. After some investigation this seems to be a "feature" of a lot of new ftp daemons, in particluar proftpd that a lot of the Debian mirror sites seem to favor.
Further investigation showed that even my mirror of slink was not being updated properly. So this has been going on for some time, I just never looked to see if my mirror was being updated. It wasn't. I thought I could get around the problem by going ahead and mirroring the binary-i386 and binary-all portions of potato. Unfortunately, there's a lot in potato that merely links to slink and I definately don't have the space to mirror potato and slink. The question is has anyone gotten around this problem. It's quite easy to show. Simply log in via an ftp client to one of the mirrors and do: cd /debian/dists/potato/main/binary-i386/admin ls -lRatL The "L" flag is supposed to "flatten" symbolic links. Unfortunately, under proftpd it doesn't. Also, I don't seem to be the only one having this problem. One of the mirror sites listed on the debian mirros page only mirrors the i386 distribution and looking at their site I noticed that none of the files that are actually symlinks in potato are there. You can verify this for yourself by looking at: ftp://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/debian/potato/main/binary-i386/admin You'll note that several files are missing from the admin section. In particular debconf_0.2.xx.deb. On the major mirros this file is actually a symbolic link to somewhere else. Any ideas appreciated. Thanks, Gary Hennigan