Gutsy upgrade question: Manually downloading some packages using wget

[Derek Broughton]

Hugo Heden wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On 10/29/07, Wulfy <wulfmann at tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
>> Hugo Heden wrote:
>> > Hi again,
>> >
>> >
>> >> Now, how do I continue? How do I tell update-manager to continue, but
>> >> using the deb-files that I have manually downloaded?
>> >>
>> >
>> > The obvious solution seems to be to copy the manually downloaded
>> > deb-files to the same location on the filesystem that update-manager
>> > has placed all the other gutsy-deb-files, and then just restart
>> > update-manager.. Right?
>> >
>> > Any ideas on where that would be?
>> >
>> > Hugo Heden
>> The standard place for downloaded debs is /var/cache/apt/archives ... at
>> least it was for apt-based front-ends.  I don't use the new-fangled GUIs.
>>
> 
> Thanks, Wulfmann.
> 
> Yes, that seems to be the only place on my computer containing deb-files.
> 
> So I tried copying the manually downloaded deb-files to that location,
> and re-ran update-manager.

No, you can't do that.

> That did not work, it seems that update-manager *recreates*
> /var/cache/apt/archives from some internal data-base..? 

Not as such...

> So the
> deb-files I had copied disappeared from /var/cache/apt/archives, and

I expect that's just the normal result of trying to output to an already
open file.  Try something like 
# grep abc /somefile-containing-abc >/somefile-containing-abc

and it will get trashed, too (though I think it just ends up empty).

If you have .deb files around that aren't in your apt cache you _must_ use
dpkg to install them.

> update-manager tried to get them from the net again. And failed.
> 
> So obviously there is an internal database that apt-get/update-manager
> uses, and I would want to *manually* add the manually downloaded
> deb-files to that database..

There is such a database, but really it's not "obvious" from your described
behavior.

In fact, in your case, I'd check /var/cache/apt/partial - downloaded files
go there as they're being downloaded, and are then moved to the archives
directory.  Possibly they never left, because you had the output file open.
-- 
derek