How to dynamically add a repository in FAI?

Alex Ingle ingle.as at gmail.com
Thu Sep 3 09:16:00 CEST 2009


Hello,
We are using FAI to install Debian on different PCs and devices and
met a problem that should be quite common but we couldn't find an easy or
obvious solution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Can someone suggest a way to install different versions of the same package
for different HW platforms?
Our thoughts were the following.
1) Using instsoft hook, which is run before packages installation process
starts, to add HW specific repository for the platform handled.
apt-get update is run after adding a HW repository to sources.list. We tried
this but didn't succeed.

2) Next idea is to have all versions of all packages in FAI mirror and
choose Packages.gz for particular HW platform dinamically.

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.
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.

Did anyone solve similar problems? Can you suggest a way from your
experience?

Thank you in advance,
Alexey.
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