can Smart schedule downloads

[Anders F Björklund]

Radovan Prodanovic wrote:

> Gustavo,
>  
> For some customers with challenging BW for downloads, it would be beneficial to be able to split the download and upgrade into two controllable and schedulable steps. So one would first (schedule) download all the content and then, as a separate step, schedule the upgrade itself using this previously downloaded content.

There's always ye ole --download option, combined with something like cron/at...

Or you could set up a local proxy, and cache the packages there ahead of time ?

https://alioth.debian.org/projects/apt-cacher-ng/

Authentication would be an issue too, since most things like "sudo" etc time out.

> Is something like this available currently (I doubt it but it never hurts to ask), and if not would it be feasible to implement?

Back in the day there was some talk about a "service pack", which was a package archive.

https://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2008/02/11/service-packs-and-packagekit/

Smart also got an implementation, but it never caught on. Basically it was a tarball/zip.

http://lists.labix.org/pipermail/smart-labix.org/2008-September/003743.html

--anders