Re: Apt at fedora.us

[Panu Matilainen <pmatilai welho com>]

On Mon, 31 Jan 2005, Warren Togami wrote:
> Ville Skyttä wrote:
> > FWIW, I would like to see the complete apt'table (pre-)Extras SRPMS
> > repos available at fedora.us and its mirrors.  The reasons have been
> > outlined in this thread.
>
> I have to admit that I don't understand if there is any purpose in this. 
> "apt-get source" is only a convenience but otherwise is not very useful.

Well, 'apt-get install foobar' is only a convenience as well, you could 
just as well manually locate latest version of, download and install with 
rpm. I find it a major pain in the ass to manually locate the latest 
version of a given src.rpm when apt (or any similar tool) can do it 
automatically for you.


> "apt-get build-dep" does not need SRPMS at all except the local SRPM, which 
> you already have locally because you want to build it.  Is there some aspect 
> of this that I am failing to see?  I fail to see the "need" in this.

You have to manually locate and download the SRPM first, and then use
# apt-get build-dep /path/to/srpms/foobar-1.2-1.src.rpm
compared to just
# apt-get build-dep foobar

It IS a much more convenient for us who deal with SRPMS a lot. Because the 
lack of the SRPMS I keep a local apt-enabled mirror of FC to be able to 
access the SRPMS without all the manual work, which feels somewhat 
ridiculous to me.

> From the perspective of mirror administrators it is somewhat painful to host 
> redundant RPMS.  I personally don't have the disk space to do this forever 
> with all distributions.
>
> I suppose it is tolerable to do only SRPMS.extras of the latest stable 
> distribution.  When FC4 happens, I will wipe the 3 SRPMS.extras.  Is this 
> acceptable?  I will however not add the base and updates SRPMS.


That'd be a definite improvement over not having the SRPMS at all.

	- Panu -