It could be useful to add a command line flag to apt-offline get so that it generates an unambiguous list of files to download and the corresponding local file name, so that the download process can be performed even if, e.g.: apt-offline (or python) is not available on the internet-connected machine. For instance, one could easily parse this output and pass it to wget or curl.
The workflow would then be:
# on the target machine
apt-offline set ... file.sig
apt-offline get --print-uris file.sig # store this output
# on the host machine
# parse the above output, manually download the uris to the designated filenames
#on the target machine
apt-offline install ...
Use case:
Our board runs Debian on an embedded Linux computer which is offline, however the user routinely connects to it via USB ethernet connection and loads in their own browser an IDE which is served by a server running on the board. This means that - if the remote repo allows CORS - the user's browser can fetch the packages and download them to the board; it therefore has the potential to substitute itself to the `apt-offline get` step. In principle, we could use the stock `apt-offline`, parse the signature file and perform the download of files to the correct filename, however that requires a lot of second guessing (e.g.: InRelease -> Release, various zipped extensions, etc). By adding a dedicated option to `apt-offline get`, so that it generates the URI->filename list for us, no second guessing is needed and the browser's downloading task becomes much simpler.
It could be useful to add a command line flag to
apt-offline getso that it generates an unambiguous list of files to download and the corresponding local file name, so that the download process can be performed even if, e.g.: apt-offline (or python) is not available on the internet-connected machine. For instance, one could easily parse this output and pass it towgetorcurl.The workflow would then be: