High cost of patches

[Sam Couter]

This reply is a bit slow, I've been away for two or three weeks... I
haven't seen any other replies, but maybe I just missed them.

Michael James <michael at james.st> wrote:
> A feature I can't find in any of the Linux online update mechanisms
>  (haven't tried Debian or OpenBSD yet)
>  is to be able to configure the update tool
>  with an ordered list of patch sources like CPAN.

Debian's APT can support a list of sources for packages. It's handled a
bit differently to CPAN though. APT will query *all* of your sources for
package lists, then merge them into one big list of all available
packages.

> Or thinking about adding it externally,
>  which distros have an HTTP based fetch mechanism that allows a proxy?
> I could configure my local squid to hold the patches for me.

Debian's APT can also do this. I have a local proxy set up specifically
to cache Debian packages from various sources (custom CGI primarily
written by a workmate), but with careful configuration squid can do the
job almost as well.

> Or better I could write some perl URL re-writing rules
>  that would implement the prefered source policy
>  with cache management based on keeping patches
>  till a more recent version appeared.

Along with the custom CGI script is a small script run from cron that
parses package lists and deletes old packages from the local cache.

There is a publically available APT proxy, packaged as apt-proxy in
Debian.

You should also check out apt-move, which can help you manually manage a
local partial mirror of packages.
-- 
Sam "Eddie" Couter  |  mailto:sam at topic.com.au
Internet Engineer   |  jabber:sam at jabber.topic.com.au
tSA Consulting      |  http://www.topic.com.au/
OpenPGP fingerprint:  A46B 9BB5 3148 7BEA 1F05  5BD5 8530 03AE DE89 C75C
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