Gutsy upgrade question: Manually downloading some packages using wget

[Hugo Heden]

Thanks Derek,

Note that I've been able to solve this issue -- see
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/2007-October/127892.html

-- though I changed the subject line of that email (to include the
word [SOLVED]), so it might have broken the threaded view in some
email clients..?

Further comments below.

On 10/30/07, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> 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.

Glad to hear I was close :-) I think maybe this could have worked,
though fortunately it turned out not to be needed.

I also completely understand what you are saying here. The thing I
tried to do was not exactly what you're describing here though -- I
realize I could have expressed myself more compactly and clearly. (Or
perhaps I actually couldn't, because I am sometimes not so good at
that.) I had an issue with a dist-upgrade failing downloading some
files, so I thought I could download these files manually and put them
i that local repository.. But again, see
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/2007-October/127892.html
..

Anyway -- many many thanks for all the pointers -- I've learned a lot!

Best regards

Hugo Heden