Gutsy upgrade question: Manually downloading some packages using wget

[Hugo Heden]

On 10/29/07, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> Hugo Heden wrote:
>
> > On 10/29/07, Wulfy <wulfmann at tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
> >> Hugo Heden wrote:
> >> > 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..
> >> >
> >> > Any ideas?
> >> >
> >> > Hugo Heden
> >> The only thing I can think of which might work (though others may have
> >> more knowledge than I do) is when you've moved the debs to the archive,
> >> run:
> >>
> >> sudo dpkg -i *.deb
> >>
> >> which will install all the debs.  I'm not sure that would work...  if
> >> there were dependency problems (old debs?) in there, it might bomb out
> >> and leave you in a more difficult state than you're in now.  :@(
> >>
> >
> > Thanks again Wulfmann,
> >
> > Yeah, I tried that, but since those deb-files are "from Gutsy" and my
> > current install is Feisty, dpkg refuses to install the packages due to
> > conflicting and missing dependencies.
>
> Then you can't install them, period.
>
> Your best bet is to download the _source_ debs from gutsy, and recompile
> them on your system - but there's no guarantee they'll compile, either.

Thanks Derek,

I appreciate all the pointers.

We'll see what I'll end up doing. I *will* be able to solve this
somehow (there's always Fresh Install), so it is not a matter of life
or death or anything -- now it's more that I'm getting curious.. I am
not sure I understand why I can't do this (but I'm rather close to
just taking your word for it..)

I mean, if update-manager does (in principle)

1) Modify sources.list
2) Download packages
3) Install those packages (resolving dependencies etc)

then should I not be able to intervene in step 2 and "help"
update-manager to get around a crappy-network-connection-problem by
manually downloading some packages?

How about creating a local repository containing the manually
downloaded deb-files, and then try to convince apt-get (or, better
yet, update-manager) that this repository "belongs to gutsy"..

Something like this:

Start by creating an index file, Packages.gz:

$ cd $HOME/dir/containing/debs
$ dpkg-scanpackages . /dev/null > Packages
$ gzip Packages

And then editing /etc/apt/sources.list -- replace all occurrences of
"feisty" with "gutsy", and adding my local repository to the top of
the file:

deb file:/home/heden/dir/containing/debs gutsy universe

and lastly

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Would something like that be an option? I realize that I probably have
to fix some errors above (for example, not all packages are from
universe so perhaps I need to create a more complicated local
repository, "resembling" a real repository) -- but in principle?


Best regards

Hugo Heden