Chapter 5. The Debian FTP archives

24

5.10 What's in the

pool

directory?

Packages are kept in a large `pool', structured according to the name of the source package. To

make this manageable, the pool is subdivided by section (`main', `contrib' and `non free') and

by the first letter of the source package name. These directories contain several files: the binary

packages for each architecture, and the source packages from which the binary packages were

generated.

You can find out where each package is placed by executing a command like

apt cache

showsrc mypackagename

and looking at the `Directory:' line. For example, the

apache

packages are stored in

pool/main/a/apache/

.

Additionally, since there are so many

lib*

packages, these are treated specially: for instance,

libpaper packages are stored in

pool/main/libp/libpaper/

.

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5.11 What is  incoming ?

After a developer uploads a package, it stays for a short while in the  incoming  directory

before it is checked that it's genuine and allowed into the archive.

Usually nobody should install things from this place. However, in some rare cases of emer 

gency, the incoming directory is available at

http://incoming.debian.org/

. You can

manually fetch packages, check the GPG signature and MD5sums in the .changes and .dsc

files, and then install them.

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Historically, packages were kept in the subdirectory of

dists

corresponding to which distribution contained

them. This turned out to cause various problems, such as large bandwidth consumption on mirrors when major

changes were made. This was fixed with the introduction of the package pool. The

dists

directories are still

used for the index files used by programs like

apt

. You may also still see paths containing

dists/potato

or

dists/woody

in the Filename header field of some older packages.