Does anybody know of the replacement for apt-setup? Used to be in past stables...

I never heard of apt-setup until the last few days when some people have asked about it. I have done a search on Sarge packages, and no such package exists there. It's a mystery to me.

Based on how people claim to have used it, I'd say the closest thing is apt-spy; but before you use it, read the man pages, and make sure you understand that it will overwrite your sources.list file. It also takes quite a while to run since it is testing many repositories to find you the fastest one. Using the options described in the man page, it is possible to limit the number of repos it will test.

also in the man pages you can direct it to write to a new file instead of overwriting your old one. though the package isnt too stable at the moment, im using it in testing and it keeps segfaulting causing it to crash. a bug report is filed though so hopefully it will get cleared up soon...

I didn't know that. It ran fine for me, AMD64, but it took a long time checking all the mirrors in the US.

It was a part of base and you could call invoke it later as well. Does not seem to be used anymore or is only used in the installer. I use to suggest it as a easy way to pick sources.

you could also use netselect-apt, it basically works in the same way apt-spy does, only it uses netselect as a front end to measure download speed of debian servers. in the man page it shows how you can tweak it to search branch specific as well as non free repositories. its also alot faster than apt-spy without the segfault. oh and heres the actual report for that if anyones interested... http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=418548

It was part of base-config which seems to only exist in oldstable (sarge)

http://packages.debian.org/oldstable/base/base-config

I tried installing it from http://http://ftp.si.debian.org/debian/pool/main/b/base-config/ but it conflicts with locales

it still exists in the installer packages but it is udebs only

I think that of the suggestions in the thread, my vote would go to netselect-apt, for the OP.

Runs pretty quickly. Writes the source.list file in the directory from which it was run ... (/tmp would be my suggestion). You can just rename the sources.list file it writes, and run it again for different suggestions. When you like what it says, copy the appropriate lines to your real sources.list or use it to replace your /etc/apt/sources.list

This is the first time I can actually help with a linux question.

If anybody is still reading... I used apt-setup to automatically scan all the DVD's I had downloaded and set my proxy server information. Unfortunately for some unknown reason (possibility security?) it has been dropped from etch.

the "apt-cdrom add" command will accomplish the first goal but I guess I will have to modify APT_CONFIG on my own.

And as for the web sources "netselect-apt" works OK.

utanja:
Have you tried 'base-config'?

base-config should no longer exist either iirc

base-config no longer allows multiple repositories unless i miss something...what I want to do is setup two or three repository one each for stable, testing and SID....i find that some repository are faster with testing as oppose to stable etc.....not a real problem but i was just wondering what happen to it.....