Much of this is obsolete: I no longer use debmirror and no longer keep
the entire binary repository of i386 arch.
There's a useful tool in Debian named debmirror. It's function is to create and manage a partial copy of an official Debian repository, and I use it to create 2 repos:
How this works is that I'd run the following command (an example for the source repo):
/usr/bin/debmirror
--verbose
--progress
--host=ftp.sun.ac.za
--passive
--dist=squeeze
--root=ftp/debian
--section=main
--method=ftp
--arch=none
/home/wena/.repo_src
(look at debmirror's manpage to see what all those options mean)
The result is that I'll be having ~30GB of Debian locally (for a comparison, see total Debian archive size).
That's a lot of data, most of which I'll never use, but:
- I do this as a matter of convenience; I want to be able to install anything when I'm having a fresh machine, and internet access is not yet fast and cheap in South Africa.
- I also like to mess around with the packaging system, deleting and reinstalling packages on a whim, and I don't want to be waiting for some file to download when I do that kind of tinkering.
Now, since it's ridiculous to do this every time just to have the most recent packages (a weekly update is maybe >1GB of data), I've found another wonderful tool named reprepro. It's purpose is to create a custom (unofficial) Debian repo. It's a far more advanced tool than debmirror, and I think it can do what debmirror does (but I don't yet care to learn how).
Moving on, here's the relevant entries from my /etc/apt/sources.list file:
# local repos (debmirror)
deb file:/home/wena/.repo_bin sid main
deb-src file:/home/wena/.repo_src sid main
# local repo (reprepro)
deb file:/home/wena/.repo_local cache main
# remote repo
deb ftp://ftp.sun.ac.za/ftp/debian/ sid main non-free contrib
So, what I do on a semi-regular basis is run:
wajig update && wajig upgrade
The newly-updated packages are stored in a cache so that a reinstall doesn't have to fetch from network again. After this I run:
reprepro -vv --basedir ~/.repo_local includedeb cache /var/cache/apt/archives/*deb
This updates the local reprepro repo and after which I can then remove the cached packages:
wajig clean
I do that because they are now available in my reprepro-managed repo. That now means that I got a massive mirror managed by debmirror and a smaller one managed by reprepro, and I have these on an external drive for in case I want to install Debian anywhere. What else my reprepro repo has is some other packages like skype and oracle-xe, as well as some odd packages from Debian Experimental.
Not so simple I guess... but works so well for my needs.