Impossible to publish multiples distributions with same prefix

[chavalc]

It appears that it is impossible to publish more than one distribution on with same prefix.

Detailed Description

For my needs, I have to mirror two distributions of the same archive and publish them.

I can publish the first distribution without problem (thanks to a snapshot of the mirror). However, when the second distribution is published, the following error appears (for example) :

ERROR: unable to publish: unable to process packages: error linking file to /root/.aptly/public/hardware-mcp/pool/main/s/sblim-cmpi-devel/libcmpicppimpl0_2.0.3-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb: file already exists and is different

After verification, my two distributions contain packages unchanged from one to the other (same versions but different checksums).

A workaround I could find is to include the distribution name in the prefix but this does not seem very practical.

Possible Implementation

After some investigations, it seems that this is due to the architecture of files retained for publication and especially that of the folder pool of the published archive.

There come to mind a possible solution: create a subfolder by distribution in the pool folder (by component too ?).

Your Environment

OS : Debian Jessie 8.7
Aptly : 0.9.7

[chavalc]

After reflection, the problem would come more from the original deposit of my mirrors because it does not respect the architectural conventions of the folder pool of an archive. Indeed, my original repository contains subfolders by distribution and packages of the same version have different checksums.

What do you think about that ?

[smira]

The repository layout is not something invented with aptly, it's standard Debian repository format (https://wiki.debian.org/RepositoryFormat).

Debian best practices say that there should be no two packages with same version (filename) and package contents. As pool/ like you said is shared between the distributions, this restriction makes sense. Debian repository follows same structure, and this makes some sense, if you have same package shared between distributions, it would have only single file in pool/.

If you still want to have different contents for same package version, just use prefix feature of the publish commands, that way aptly would create subdirectory under public root (which will also make pool/ separate for each published repo).

[chavalc]

Thank you for you reply.

The problem is due to my originals deposits : they don't respect best practices.

[spielkind]

Is it possible add such an unsupported feature anyway? As it seems that breaking rules is more common example: https://apt.puppetlabs.com/pool/

[smira]

It's certainly possible, but I don't see big difference with using separate prefix which is more clean and achieves roughly same effect.