I just used apt-move, and it went well. Thanks to all who worked on it. MINOR MYSTERY I wonder if anyone can shed any light on one small problem. After the main creation of the archive (get, move, packages) I tried to replace one deb with a locally built one. They both have the same version (the package is mpatrol and the locally built one works with the current gcc and libstdc++). I got this: # rm /usr/local/var/mirrors/debian/pool/main/m/mpatrol/mpatrol_1.4.8-6_i386.deb wheat:/usr/local/rootlog# time apt-move movefile /usr/local/src/tools/mpatrol_1.4.8-6_i386.deb
Moving files... Skipping files: /usr/local/src/tools/mpatrol_1.4.8-6_i386.deb Moving Files: (I tried it without the rm first). Can anyone explain why the request gets skipped? Is this an optimization to avoid repeatedly copying the same file from cache/apt? If I had rerun apt-move packages after rm'ing the file would it have caught on the file was missing? I ended up just copying over the deb in the pool; I assume that will work. QUESTION/SUGGESTION Would it be possible to use links, rather than actual copies of the debs? It seems kind of wasteful to have this stuff duplicated. Perhaps hard or symlinks could be offered (or default to hard if on same volume). I can think of two possible problems with this; I'm not sure if they motivated the original design decision. Both would apply to symlinks only. First, if the file in cache/apt is deleted, the mirror would be in a bogus state. Second, if the volumes got mounted in different spots (e.g., if you had multiple systems to boot into, or some chroots) they might fail to resolve. It still seems to me this might be a useful option. I think apt-proxy has a "setup from cache/apt" command that does something similar to apt-move, but with links. BACKGROUND I have a single machine with multiple partitions and a slow connection. I'm interested in using debootstrap and setting up alternate systems and alternate chroots. apt-move seemed to be the right tool for the job. In particular, though sharing /var/cache/apt between different systems would suffice to avoid double downloads via apt, debootstrap seems to require a "real" debian archive rather than just apt's cache.
