On Tue, 10 Aug 2004, Russ Allbery wrote: > Unless I'm missing something in the documentation, currently apt-ftparchive > doesn't support adding all of the packages in binary-all to the individual > package files for each architecture. Looking at the Debian archive, this > is the expected behavior, and apt-get doesn't download the binary-all > Package file and therefore will miss any architecture-independent packages > in an archive indexed by apt-ftparchive.
The expected operation is that whatever is invoking apt-ftparchive arranges for things to be structured so that it sees binary-all files while running. This is done in one of two ways: 1) New style pools way - the script that extracts the files lists unions all and each arch together and produces a file list file compatible with the FileList argument 2) Old style debian way - Even though there was a binary-all directory the archive scripts were expected to maintain symlinks from binary-* to binary-all. Both allow apt-ftparchive to see the all files when processing a per-arch package file and it will produce the expected output. If you really want to maintain an old-style archive without the symlinks then I suggest you invoke apt-ftparchive using the FileList mechanism and have an external script produce a unioned file listing (ie find binary-all -type f && find binary-i386 -type f > flist.i386). The flist mechanism is how apt-ftparchive supports all configurations besides the old style debian archive with symlinks. What are you trying to do anyhow? I can't think of any good reason to split things up by binary-* unless you are maintaining a really big archive.. For smaller archives it is OK to produce a mixed architecture package file, apt/etc handle it just fine. Jason
