Hoary xpdf binaries have disappeared

[Mike Bird]

On Wed, 2005-05-25 at 08:58, Markus Kolb wrote:
> It is linked to main. So it is still in main. Where is the problem?
> Maybe it is preparation for the next release.


Hi Markus,


1. Having symlinks from main to universe means that a mirror of main (or
main+restricted) is incomplete.  People mirroring with rsync can work
around the problem with -L but that wastes space.  I don't know of a
solution for people mirroring with e.g. lftp.  Main should not depend
upon Universe - particularly for files which are currently in Hoary's
Packages.gz and required by ubuntu-desktop.

$ lftp ftp.ubuntu.com
lftp ftp.ubuntu.com:/> ls
/ubuntu/pool/main/x/xpdf/xpdf_3.00-11ubuntu3_all.deb
lrwxrwxrwx    1 1000     1000           60 May 24 09:45
xpdf_3.00-11ubuntu3_all.deb ->
../../../../pool/universe/x/xpdf/xpdf_3.00-11ubuntu3_all.deb


2. For roughly 24 hours there was not even a symlink for xpdf, resulting
in apt-get failures similarly to those shown below for readahead.


3. There are still neither regular files nor symlinks for readahead -
again a package in Hoary's Packages.gz and required by ubuntu-desktop.
This one has been down over 24 hours now.

# apt-get update
<snip>
Fetched 71.9kB in 2s (25.0kB/s)
Reading package lists... Done
# apt-get install readahead
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  readahead
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 7708B of archives.
After unpacking 81.9kB of additional disk space will be used.
Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hoary/main readahead 1.0.1-2ubuntu1
  404 Not Found
Failed to fetch
http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/r/readahead/readahead_1.0.1-2ubuntu1_i386.deb  404 Not Found
E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with
--fix-missing?


4. I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that the pool was maintained
automatically.  As such the problems suggested a pool maintenance
software bug or a black hat.

If the pool is not maintained automatically than perhaps automatic pool
maintenance is a worthwhile goal.


5. A worthwhile partial solution would be to verify hourly that all
packages in the various current Packages.gz are still present and
resolve to a regular non-empty file in the same repository or in the
main repository.


--Mike Bird