Hello,<br>We are using FAI to install Debian on different PCs and devices and <br>met a problem that should be quite common but we couldn't find an easy or obvious solution.<br>We have a core of stable packages that are used by any HW platform. But also we need to install different versions of some packages on different HW platforms.<br>
A good example is video drivers. For some cards we need not stable versions (testing or unstable) of drivers that by-turn depend on not stable versions of xserver-xorg-core and some other Debian packages.<br>We need to have installed not stable version of packages only for those HW platforms that do need them. For others stable versions of the same packages must be used.<br>
So, the best case is if we could describe a stable repository common for all the platforms and a non stable repository or repository branch for each plaftorm that needs not stable versions of packages.<br>FAI mirror can be combined from different repositories that can be configured in FAI config (/etc/fai/apt/sources.list) but is a single repository.<br>
<br>Can someone suggest a way to install different versions of the same package for different HW platforms?<br>Our thoughts were the following.<br>1) Using instsoft hook, which is run before packages installation process starts, to add HW specific repository for the platform handled.<br>
apt-get update is run after adding a HW repository to sources.list. We tried this but didn't succeed.<br><br>2) Next idea is to have all versions of all packages in FAI mirror and choose Packages.gz for particular HW platform dinamically.<br>
<br>3) As we know it is not possible to have different version of packages in one repository index file (Packages.gz), otherwise we could think about describing exact version in dependency. <br>So, we even thought about renaming not stable versions of packages to an extended name containing e.g. "testing" suffix. It's feasible but it's hard to mantain we think.<br>
<br>Did anyone solve similar problems? Can you suggest a way from your experience?<br><br>Thank you in advance,<br>Alexey.<br>