Re: [Apt-proxy-users] .conf setting for partial mirror

[Chris H. <chr...@gm...>]

Hi Thomas,

On Tue, Jun 04, 2002 at 10:18:56AM -0500, Thomas Cook wrote:
> I am trying to set up a partial Debian archive mirror for my network using
> apt-proxy.  Unfortunately, I don=B9t have 40+ Gb to use, so I would like =
to
> only mirror i386 testing (contrib., main, non-free, non-us, no source).

I'm not sure if you understand what apt-proxy does.  It is not a mirroring
tool that creates a complete mirror of all packages - see debmirror for
that.  But if you are concerned about disk space, apt-proxy more suitable.

apt-proxy will only mirror packages that are requested by clients (machines
running apt), so if you only tell your clients to use apt-proxy for i386
testing packages, apt-proxy will only mirror those files in i386 testing
that have been requested.

> After reading the man pages and the README file, my impression is that th=
is
> is done in the add_backend section of apt-proxy.conf, but I'm a little fu=
zzy
> on the details.

Yes, that's right.

> In looking through the Debian archive by hand, I can see that under the
> stable 'potato' directories, there are real .deb packages, but under test=
ing
> and unstable, there is only a package list.  Do I aim apt-proxy at the li=
st
> files?  Do I need to pick each package out of the stable dir?

apt-proxy determines which files to download by looking at the requests
received from apt clients.

You just need to configure apt-proxy with the toplevel directory of the
archive hierarchy using add_backend as given in the example apt-proxy.conf.
As you say, it means apt-proxy could potentially mirror packages from all
the distributions - potato,woody,sid etc., but it will only populate the
cache with files that have been requested.  Provided your clients are not
configured to request packages from stable or sid from apt-proxy, those
files will not be mirrored.

Chris