Re: [Synaptic-devel] Newbie qstn: repository on a local hard disk?

[Ari Torhamo]

WARNING, WARNING! NEWBIE STUFF AHEAD. This writing may be of interest
for only those who want to know, what goes on in a newbies head when he
is faced with something confusing. 

It's been a few days since I was told here how to create a repository in
Synaptic of a local directory (thank you Michael Vogt and others). Now I
have had time to try this, and I did succeed in creating one :-) It took
me about two hours to accomplish - stop laughing... all of you... NOW! 

The thing that caused the delay, was that I had some wrong presumtions
of the repository system. I thought that one has to know exactly how to
name the local directories, and accordingly, what to write into the
Distribution -field, when adding the local repository. I thought that
there are some naming rules one has to go by, in order to get the
installation program to work right and not maybe in the worst scenario
to mess up the whole system. When I look at the http-repositories I have
defined in (copied into) Synaptic, there seems to be a pattern in what
they have inside the Distribution-field. It's mainly fedora/2/en/i386 or
fedora/2. Michael Vogt used "connectiva" for this field in his
instructions for me. I "knew", of course, that I can't use "connectiva".
I'm not that naive, I thought :-) I was really puzzled by what I should
put there. I surfed around the web trying to find this piece of
information - what exactly to write into the distribution field when
using Fedora and adding a local repository! Then, at some point, when
going around clicking in the http-repositories, I started to think that
what if there is no rule, maybe it's just a path! On the other hand this
idea looked silly to me - why on earth would there be a special field
called "Distribution", if it had no special purpose - other than just
being a part of the directory path? Because I had nothing else to lose,
but the system stability :) I decided to try. I just gave a random name
for a repository folder and filled it in the Distribution-field. And
heureka! There it was.

At the end the question remains, why has the repository path be divided
in two. I did some experimenting and noticed that it makes no
difference, how large chunk of the path you put into the URI-field and
how large to the Distribution-field as long as you put the RPMS-part to
the Section(s)-field. Maybe there are some historical, or other reasons
for this - it would be interesting to know.

I know this story may seem silly and not so usefull from a developers
point of view. But maybe it can serve as a small example of how one
trivial thing can be a major obstacle for someone new to a program (and
Linux).

Cheers,
Ari


pe, 2004-07-23 kello 14:24, Michael Vogt kirjoitti:
> On Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 05:28:08AM +0300, Ari Torhamo wrote:
> > Hello!
> Hi,
>  
> [..]
> > I often use Synaptic to install and upgrade software (also default Yum
> > for system upgrades). Using Synaptic for these tasks feels rather simple
> > and intuitive. I have had some problems too, many of which relate to
> > documentation. There are some things that I know I should be able to do
> > with Synaptic, but I don't know how.
> 
> Great to hear that it (mostly) is simple and intuitive :)
> 
> > One of these things is installing software which resides on my own hard
> > disk. It's mentioned in the Synaptic manual that repositories can be
> > located on a local hard disk. I tried hard to make Synaptic to see a
> > directory on my hard disk as a repository, but I failed. What I tried to
> > do, was to add a path to the directory in question in a field named
> > "URI" in the "Repositories" window. When I clicked "OK", nothing new
> > ever appeared in the repository list. I tried to write the path in
> > several different ways, but nothing worked. I even tried to search the
> > web for several hours for the answer and did find a couple of people
> > asking the same question, but they were just guided to do the thing
> > using command line tools. I realize that it may just be some simple
> > trivial thing, which I don't see, but anyway I'm stuck. (In the future
> > I'll propably have the same problem with optical disks.)
> 
> You may try the rpm-dir method of apt-rpm. Have a look at:
> http://lwn.net/Articles/60650/
> (3. Local repositories)
> 
> Basicly you just have to drop all the RPMs you want to have in your
> local repository into one directory (e.g. /repos/conectiva/RPMS.local)
> and then add the following to your sources.list: 
> rpm-dir file:///repos conectiva local
> 
> It's a pretty cool feature!
> 
> I hope this is what you are looking for.
> 
> > Thank's for the developers for Synaptic - I really like to use it. If
> > anyone is interested, I might send more questions, comments or
> > suggestions from a newbie perspective in the future.
> 
> Yes, feedback is always welcome. Just send it we'll try to address it :)
> 
> Cheers,
>  Michael
>