Synaptic without broadband Internet

[James Livingston]

On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 22:38 +0100, Duncan Lithgow wrote:
> Surely (as others have said) a server based solution would be best. 
> Select the parameters, you get a list of files, download them. One is a 
> bash script which installs the others.

That won't work without information from the linux machine, because the
server (or net connected machine) won't know what you have installed.
Deciding what needs downloading requires that knowledge, which means
there are two general solution (with lots of potential implementations):


1) The linux machine decides what packages it needs to install and
creates a file that the net connected machine uses to download them. The
file could be a list of package urls, a executable script, or whatever.

The downside of this is that the linux machine must have up-to-date
repository listing to do this, and they may be unreasonable to download.


2) The linux machine creates a file describing what it has installed,
and the net-connected machine/server decides what packages are needed
and downloads them.

The downside is that the machine or server has to basically implement
apt/yum/whatever, so that it can decide what to install. However it has
the advantage that it will work when the linux machine has no 'net
connection at all.


I think (2) is much better, but it may make the application for the 'net
connected machine (which would want to run on Windows at least) too
complicated.


My 2c,

James "Doc" Livingston
-- 
Two decades later, hacker Henry Spencer described the Perl scripting
language as a "Swiss-Army chainsaw", intending to convey his evaluation
of the language as exceedingly powerful but ugly and noisy and prone to
belch noxious fumes.
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