Gutsy upgrade question: Manually downloading some packages using wget

[Derek Broughton]

Hugo Heden wrote:

> 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?

Sure you should.
> 
> 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"..

I do that, using apt-move.  There's also apt-cd (I think that's the package
name, anyway) that builds a new CD repository.

> Something like this:
> 
> Start by creating an index file, Packages.gz:
> 
> $ cd $HOME/dir/containing/debs
> $ dpkg-scanpackages . /dev/null > Packages
> $ gzip Packages

I can't say for certain that that works, but it looks very similar to what I
remember :-)  You're at least close.  There's at least a couple of pages on
the Ubuntu wiki about this.
> 
> 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?

Definitely.  But note that you still have the issue that if your principle
repository is feisty and you want to install some packages from gutsy, you
need to install _all_ the dependencies of the gutsy package.  If it
requires packages not in the feisty repos, and not in your local repo, it
won't install.
-- 
derek