Apt-get alternative sites?

[Nekopa]

Hi All!
I was wondering if there is a way to add other sites to apt-get? Can you add ftp sites? Or do you have to stick with debians site?

Thanks for any info on this

Lee

[Craig McPherson]

/etc/apt/sources.list

That's the source list for APT. It can include HTTP servers, FTP servers, archives on the local filesystem (file:/), CD-ROM sets, etc. Mostly, you'll be using HTTP and FTP servers.

You should definitely pick some mirrors close to you, because the main Debian server is (intentionally) slow to encourage people to use mirrors. You can find a list of mirrors here:

Edit: The Debian website is down at the moment, so I can't link you to the mirror list. It'll probably be back up by the time you read this, and you should be able to find it.

In addition to apt sites for Debian itself, anybody else can set up apt sites for downloading of other software. You can find sources.list entries for a few hundred third-party apt sources at this site (http://www.internatif.org/bortzmeyer/debian/apt-sources/).

I once wondered what would happen if you added every source from that site, as well as many other sources I knew about, into one massive sources.list. This (http://www.bcm-hog.org/sources.list) is the somewhat infamous result. I'd been working on it since before I knew about the Bortzmeyer site, and I had a lot of stuff Bortzmeyer didn't, but assimilating (almost) everything from there (I still haven't finished incorporating it all yet, because I'm lazy and keep putting it off) made the file absolutely huge and rather unwieldy to both use and maintain. A lot of the servers on the list are very marginal -- slow or frequently down, and a lot of the packages on some of the sites violate Debian policy in ways that aren't even funny. Trying to use the entire list on an active system results in weird dependency stuff, the possibility of broken packages, and other headaches. You should probably just stick with the Debian archive itself plus stuff you specifically need/want, rather than shoving everything in existence into your sources.list. It's nice seeing 10,000 packages on your package list, but it can be something of a headache.

[ 01 October 2001: Message edited by: Craig McPherson ]

[Nekopa]

Thanks!
It is good to know that I can put other sites in there. I don't think I will use a list quite as long as the one you linked to :) but I did want to add in some 3rd party sites and so on

Cheers mate

Lee