[plug] Debmirror or what?

[Cameron Patrick]

Chris Caston wrote:

| I just looked at Debmirror and the packages description says that it
| only makes a partial mirror. I remember from a previous discussion on
| this list that is didn't mirror the udebs. Any idea why? And what
| difference is this going to make?

Why?  Because the current debmirror is an ungodly mass of Perl which
was written before udebs existed, and the current maintainer is busy
re-writing it in OCaml with a whole pile of extra features :-)  This
lack of udebs means that you won't be able to use the Sarge installer
to install from a debmirror mirror, as udebs provide components of the
installer itself.

| Will it just take what is missing from the main source?

??

| I only want a local mirror of unstable for i386.

debmirror makes this easy - that's what they mean by "partial mirror":
you want only one arch and one 

| What is the best way to achieve my goal?

debmirror is probably the easiest way.  The other alternative is
The Rsync Command Line From Hell:

rsync   --recursive --times --links --hard-links \
	--verbose --compress --timeout=120 \
	--delete --delete-after --delete-excluded \
	--exclude 'Contents-*.gz' \
	--exclude binary-arm/         --exclude "*_arm.deb" \
	--exclude  disks-arm/         --exclude installer-arm/ \
	--exclude binary-alpha/       --exclude "*_alpha.deb" \
	--exclude  disks-alpha/       --exclude installer-alpha/ \
	--exclude binary-hppa/        --exclude "*_hppa.deb" \
	--exclude  disks-hppa/        --exclude installer-hppa/ \
	--exclude binary-hurd-i386/   --exclude "*_hurd-i386.deb" \
	--exclude  disks-hurd-i386/   --exclude installer-hurd-i386/ \
	--exclude binary-ia64/        --exclude "*_ia64.deb" \
	--exclude  disks-ia64/        --exclude installer-ia64/ \
	--exclude binary-m68k/        --exclude "*_m68k.deb" \
	--exclude  disks-m68k/        --exclude installer-m68k/ \
	--exclude binary-mips/        --exclude "*_mips.deb" \
	--exclude  disks-mips/        --exclude installer-mips/ \
	--exclude binary-mipsel/      --exclude "*_mipsel.deb" \
	--exclude  disks-mipsel/      --exclude installer-mipsel/ \
	--exclude binary-powerpc/     --exclude "*_powerpc.deb" \
	--exclude  disks-powerpc/     --exclude installer-powerpc/ \
	--exclude binary-sh/          --exclude "*_sh.deb" \
	--exclude  disks-sh/          --exclude installer-sh/ \
	--exclude binary-s390/        --exclude "*_s390.deb" \
	--exclude  disks-s390/        --exclude installer-s390/ \
	--exclude binary-sparc/       --exclude "*_sparc.deb" \
	--exclude  disks-sparc/       --exclude installer-sparc/ \
	ftp.it.net.au::debian debian 2>&1  | tee rsync-debian.log

You can't narrow it down to just one of stable/testing/unstable this
way, though.  This command will also get you the source for
everything, though you can get rid of it by adding more --exclude
bits.

HTH,

Cameron.