Hi all! I've been using Debian for a month or so now and thought I really should contribute something, so...
I've written a csh utility script for managing the Debian distribution by FTP! Here is a brief description from the built-in help... ----- The purpose of this program is to make it easy to keep your local installation of Linux consistent with the Debian distribution available on many FTP sites. It does this by maintaining its own list of all the packages you have retrieved and comparing it against the manifest on the FTP site. Any packages on the FTP site that differ from the installed version, as well as any unretrieved packages are presented to you to choose from. All selected packages are then fetched from the FTP site and made available for you to install. ----- The script is available as: ftp://ftp.bnr.ca/pub/debian Built in help is availble by typing: debian (no parameters) - for usage information debian -help - for general information This program automates the FTP process and can even manage the Eagle Secure Gateway (like we have here at BNR). If anybody from BNR is reading this, you can also get it from "bcarye3a" as "/pub/debian". That version uses the internal "bcarye3a" machine as the default mirror site, though the mirror won't be up until Wednesday, Sept 20th (hopefully!). Debian has been tested reasonably thouroughly on Linux, Solaris, and HP-UX. If not run on a Linux machine, it will grab all the selected packages and archive them together for transport to a linux machine. (See "debian -help") Problems: There is one minor problem between my program and the distribution. In order for the script to properly recognize package names and version numbers from the file names, I had to build a regular-expression to describe files. Unfortunately, there are a few files in the distribution that do not match this exactly. When I ran "debian" with the "scaninst" command (see "debian -help" for more information) on my installation at home, the following packages were not properly found because of names that don't match the reg-ex I used ("package-name-[0-9].*\.deb") for matching package names. acct -- bad version number "-alpha-5-7" (must start with -digit) bison-parsers -- bad version number "-A2.3-0" (must start with -digit) bison -- bad version number "-A2.3-0" (must start with -digit) diff -- package name mismatch (file is "diffutils") ldso -- package name mismatch (file is "ld.so") shellutils -- package name mismatch (file is "sh-utils") syslogd -- package name mismatch (file is "sysklogd") xpmR6 -- package case mismatch (file is "XpmR6") These are the only problems I found out of the 100+ installed packages on my machine. I've been talking with Ian to try and get these few discrepencies fixed. This doesn't impact on the "correctness" of the program. All it means is that it might not properly recognize future package versions as "upgrades" from the one you have installed, but rather as a completely new package. I look forward to your comments and suggestions! Brian ( [EMAIL PROTECTED] ) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.
