Creating a local apt repository?

[Greg Trounson <gregtr es co nz>]

Gidday,

Not strictly Fedora-centric, but if I can get it working under RH9, I 
plan to deploy it to my Fedora machines.

Since I'm on a dial-up connection, I have copied the complete set of RH9 
rpms into one directory on my machine in an attempt at creating a local 
mirror for apt.

I have run
"genbasedir --flat --bloat --bz2only --partial --progress 
/mainarchive/redhat9 localrpms"
on this directory, and the appropriate pkglist.localrpms.bz2 etc have 
been created in /mainarchive/redhat9/base.
I have added
"rpm file:/apt/ /mainarchive/redhat9 localrpms"
to my /etc/apt/sources.list file.  Now when I do an apt-get update, my 
local archive gets ignored with:
"Ign file: /mainarchive/redhat9/base release"

Am I doing something wrong?

thanks,
Greg