[maemo-developers] explanations of the recent download problems

[From: josh.soref at nokia.com]

Ferenc wrote:
> 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.

Fwiw there are a number of mismatched files but most of them are pidgin
related, I found them while trying to mirror and trouble shooting
people's complaints.

I ended up writing a script that compared my repo against my index. I
think I decided part of the problem might relate to multiple uploads (of
the same exact filename) or multiple arches, but that's pure
speculation.

I can run the script this weekend, but I'm sure ferenc can make an
equivalent script...