bug?

[J.L. Blom]

I have for several weeks a problem with the site dl.atrpms.net for the
fc-x86_64 directories. It gave as error:
http://dl.atrpms.net/fc5-x86_64/atrpms/base/release: Not Found.
It turns out that in the subprogram "apt_rpm.py" the string
"base/release" is hard coded.
For some reason this site doesn't have a directory base and the
directory release is related to redhat(dl.atrpms.net/redhat/release).
I have no knowledge of the inner working of smart and no python
programmer but I think that this is the root of my problems. 
I found the string "base/release" in the following subprograms
apt_rpm_info.py:    if os.path.isfile(os.path.join(path,
"base/release")):
apt_rpm.py:        return [posixpath.join(self._baseurl,
"base/release")]
apt_rpm.py:        item = fetcher.enqueue(posixpath.join(self._baseurl,
"base/release"))
apt_rpm.py:            release = "base/release."+comp

I wonder if an if statement can skip these lines and what happens to the
program if that is done. Moreover why make it an error stopping the
program instead of a warning?
Joep



Joep