> (One suggestion is that it could accept "install" as well as > "--install", for more consistency with apt-get. And a -s for > simulate would also be appreciated.)
That's two wishlist bugs - I'm personally not convinced that supporting
-i|--install|install is worthwhile because apt-cross commands and
options do not always overlap the similar apt-get commands and options.
The two programs are related, of course, but I do not think it is wise
to make apt-cross mimic apt-get commands and options. apt-get is
intended for use with an entire distribution; apt-cross is only to make
foreign libraries and headers available to a cross-compiler. The
manpage makes the point that apt-cross cannot and should not seek to be
capable of installing or maintaining an entire cross install. Making
apt-cross too similar to apt-get would only increase the confusion
about the purpose of apt-cross.
At this time, I do not think that 'install' should be supported, only
--install or -i.
(Note that empdebuild {emdebian-tools} *does* mimic the underlying
pbuilder code and use the same options in the same way. That is because
it calls unchanged pbuilder functions directly
from /usr/lib/pbuilder/foo and it has been explicitly designed to be as
close to pbuilder and pdebuild as possible. Where there is clear
overlap, I would support use of the same commands and options but I do
not think this applies to apt-cross.)
The --simulate (the -s and -S options are already taken) option could
be added at some point in the future but there is a code rewrite
planned after DebConf so --simulate would have to wait until then. More
likely will be a --yes option and modified behaviour in --install so
that when the list of packages has been calculated, the user is
shown the list of packages and prompted to confirm installation. The
--yes option would override the prompt and provide the current
behaviour. i.e. the default would be --simulate or at least
--interactive. I think that is a better plan, overall. That is also
similar to apt-get, again raising the need to ensure that users are
clear on how apt-cross differs from apt-get.
(I've added that to the upstream TODO file so there is no need to file
a wishlist bug about that.)
=== main bug report ===
> So the bug is that for unstable and testing it seemed to
> automatically download the package files while for stable it didn't.
apt-cross isn't in stable. There are bugs in the dpkg-cross framework
in stable that are fixed in lenny and some bugs in lenny that have been
fixed in sid. At this time, apt-cross cannot realistically support
stable just as it cannot support oldstable. The next release will
depend on dpkg-dev >= 1.14 (via dpkg-cross >= 1.38) as a result of more
of these fixes which will make installation on stable impractical.
However, I need to see the output requested below before I can work out
why --update was not triggered in your case.
> And/or, that without the package files it printed only a very terse
> message, not "no packages files, please run apt-cross --update".
(The message has already been fixed upstream.)
> Here is the contents of my sources.list, exluding commented-out
> lines, in case it is relevent :
Actually, considerably more useful is the output of:
$ apt-cache policy
> Please excuse me if I am doing something stupid (or if you consider
> my expectations unreasonable!), and thank you for this excellent tool.
I wouldn't go that far but I think there are reasonable limits on what
apt-cross can actually support and etch just isn't quite at that level.
That said, there is a difference between running apt-cross on
unstable / testing and querying stable and trying to run apt-cross on
stable directly.
So a few requests for clarification please:
$ cat /etc/debian_version
$ apt-cache policy
Have you got similar content in ~/.dpkg-cross for stable as you have
for testing and unstable (judging just by filenames and file sizes)?
What is the content of ~/.dpkg-cross/stable/lists ?
--
Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
pgp6dC7LyITem.pgp
Description: PGP signature
