[maemo-developers] explanations of the recent download problems

[From: Ferenc Szekely]

Hello Thomas,

If you don't mind I cc: the dev list. You might not be the only one
experiencing this problem.

On Jan 16, 2008 11:25 PM, Thomas J. Baker <tjb at unh.edu> wrote:
> Hello Ferenc,
>
> I still regularly have problems with Maemo Extras. Here's an example:
>
> apt-get  install pidgin-extprefs

<snip>

> Get:1 http://repository.maemo.org chinook/free pidgin-extprefs 0.7-0nix2
> [12.4kB]
> Fetched 12.4kB in 0s (25.4kB/s)
> Failed to fetch
> http://repository.maemo.org/extras/pool/chinook/free/p/pidgin-extprefs/pidgin-extprefs_0.7-0nix2_armel.deb  Size mismatch

<snip>

>
> The strange thing is that just using wget to get the package seems to
> work. Could be a metadata problem?
>
When apt-get update talks to our repository it actually fetches a
package database [1] first. From that file apt-get knows that it
supposed to receive 12380 bytes for the
pidgin-extprefs_0.7-0nix2_armel.deb package. If you go to the pool's
index [2] you can see that the file is actually 12382 bytes long. This
could explain the size mismatch error.

Wget will not match the file size with a package db, so it will just
fetch it without a problem.

Question:
why the Packages have the wrong size. Well, frankly I don't know. It
can only be because our repo manager tool had a hiccup, though it has
been working quite well in the past years.

Anyways, I try to rebuild that package database and see if that will help.

> Thanks,
>
> tjb
> --

Thanks to you.

-ferenc

[1] http://repository.maemo.org/extras/dists/chinook/free/binary-armel/Packages
[2] http://repository.maemo.org/extras/pool/chinook/free/p/pidgin-extprefs/


> =======================================================================
> | Thomas Baker                                  email: tjb at unh.edu    |
> | Systems Programmer                                                  |
> | Research Computing Center                     voice: (603) 862-4490 |
> | University of New Hampshire                     fax: (603) 862-1761 |
> | 332 Morse Hall                                                      |
> | Durham, NH 03824 USA              http://wintermute.sr.unh.edu/~tjb |
> =======================================================================
>
>