* What it is: This project is a lightweight feature complete manager of a debian package (i.e. binary .deb and source .dsc+.tar.gz+.diff.gz) repository. Emphasis is put on having all packages in the pool/-directory, maximal checking of all sources. generation of signed Release file, Contents, ... Libraries needed are libdb{3,4.?,5.?} and libz. Libraries used if available are libgpgme, libbz2 and libarchive. * Current status: The main features work without problems. Some special use cases might not be very well tested. * Some naming conventions: basename: the name of a file without any directory information. filekey: the position relative to the mirrordir. (as found as "Filename:" in Packages.gz) full filename: the position relative to / architecture: The term like "sparc","i386","mips",... component: Things like "main" "non-free" "contrib" ... (sometimes also called sections) section: Things like "base" "interpreters" "oldlibs" (sometimes also called subsections) type: The kind of packages, currently supported: "deb", "udeb" and "dsc". target: The smallest unit packages are in. A target is specified by the codename of the distribution it is in, the architecture, component and type. When architecture is "source" exactly when the type is "dsc". identifier: an internal string to specify a target, it has the form "||source" for type dsc, "||" for type deb and "u|||" for type udeb. md5sum: The checksum of a file, being in the format " " * Differences to how other standard tools handle the situation: - mirroring: This makes no real mirror of the distribution, but only of it contents. Thus the Index-files will be different. (And thus no longer can be verified by the official signatures). This means people using this mirror have to trust you to not include anything ugly, as they can only check your signature directly. (Or in other words: not useful for mirroring things to be used by strangers). - location: The directory layout under pool/ is only divided by the component and the sourcename. Especially woody and updates/woody will share the same space, thus avoiding multiple instances of the same file. (Can also cause trouble in the rare cases, when both have a file of the same name with different md5sum. Using -f can help here). - 'byhand'-section This is currently just implemented as alias for '-', to make sure lack of implementation does not cause them to land in a byhand-section... - Override files: Only the ExtraOverride style of apt-ftparchive(1) is supported. (i.e. "packagename Section section\npackagename Maintainer maintainer\n") Note that other than apt-ftparchive case is most likely to be significant. (Having the wrong case in might also cause havoc in apt-ftparchive, as that changes the case of the fieldname, which might confuse other programs...) * Things that might be interesting to know: - guessing the component: If inserting a binary or source package without naming an component, this program has to guess of course. This will done the following way: It will take the first component with the name of the section, being prefix to the section, being suffix to the section or having the section as prefix or any. Thus having specifiend the components: "main non-free contrib non-US/main non-US/non-free non-US/contrib" should map .e.g "non-US" to "non-US/main" and "contrib/editors" to "contrib", while having only "main non-free and contrib" as components should map e.g. "non-US/contrib" to "contrib" and "non-US" to "main". NOTE: Always specify main as the first component, if you want things to end up there. NOTE: unlike in dak, non-US and non-us are different things... * How to keep multiple versions - The default behavior of this reprepro is kept to version 5.3.1's behavior. - To keep multiple versions of the same package in the archive, you have to set the "Limit" option to the desired maximum amount (or to 0 for unlimited). - See the description in the man page for details. * Database layout changes for multiple versions - The database layout changes in version 5.4.0. The difference is as following: upstream * packages.db maps "package name" to "control file" without duplicates * no packagenames.db multiple versions * packages.db maps "package name|version" to "control file" without duplicates * packagenames.db maps "package name" to "package name|version" allowing duplicates and duplicates sorted by dpkg --compare-versions descending - Automatic upgrade The first time the database is opened by reprepro with multiple versions support, the database will be upgraded from the upstream layout to the multiple versions layout. *Warning*: There is no way back (but could be done with a simple Python script)!