Entries tagged apt

Thanks to the people who commented on my post about a decent apt cacher, it was good to see that I'm not alone.

Thanks to RobertH for recommending the new tool acng - I've not used it yet, instead I gave it a quick look and reported a potentially serious bug. Hopefully that'll be fixed in the next release.

In the meantime apt-cacher actually appears to be holding up quite nicely and the nice HTML report it generates is cute!

Now onto the next challenge...

I would like some kind of tool to convert a random hierarchy of images (jpg) into a small gallery. (Utterly non-dynamic - but ideally with tagging support and RSS feeds).

There seem to be a plethora of options to the problem, suprisingly many of them involving Python ..

If anybody has any pointers I'd appreciate a link.

For reference my current galleries tend to look like this - warning fluffy animals!

Using "apt-cache search static gallery" I find three programs:

bins - Very heavyweight. Unattractive.

photon - Pretty. Requires GIMP for creating thumbnails - unsuitable for my lightweight webhost.

jigl - Looks great. Does 90% of what I want - specifically misses tags & rss.

Tags: apt, apt-caching, debian packages, image galleries, lazyweb, security holes | No comments

Yesterday I overhauled my Debian package-hosting repository, in response to user-complaints.

I started down the rabit hole due to:

  W: No Hash entry in Release file /.._._Release which is considered strong enough for security purposes

I fixed that by changing my hashes from SHA1 to SHA256 + SHA512, but I was only making a little progress, due to the more serious problem, my repository-signing key was DSA-based and "small". I replaced it with a modern key, then changed how I generate my packages and all is well.

In the past I was generating the Release files manually, via a silly shell-script. Anyway here is my trivial Makefile for making the per-project and per-distribution archive, no doubt it could be improved:

   all: repo

   clean:
       @rm -f InRelease Packages Sources Packages.gz Sources.gz Release Release.gpg

   Packages: $(wildcard *.deb)
       @apt-ftparchive packages . > Packages 2>/dev/null
       @gzip -c Packages > Packages.gz

   Sources: $(wildcard *.tar.gz)
       @apt-ftparchive sources . > Sources 2>/dev/null
       @gzip -c Sources > Sources.gz

   repo: Packages Sources
       @apt-ftparchive release . > Release
       @gpg --yes --clearsign -o InRelease Release
       @gpg --yes -abs -o Release.gpg Release

In conclusion, in the unlikely event you're using my packages please see GPG-instructions. I've also hidden any packages which were solely for Squeeze and Wheezy, but they continue to exist to avoid breaking links.

Tags: apt, packages | No comments