unable to mirror repos with no dest

[AEA IT]

When trying to mirror something like the r-project they don't have a dest folder. https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/bionic-cran40/. I can set the url to cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu and use remoteroot as focal-cran40 but then it wants to append /dest/// to the url.

$host="cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu";

$remoteroot=("focal-cran40" , 'bionic-cran40');
$download_method="https";
$check_gpg=0;
@rsync_extra=( 'none',);

@dists=( '/',);
@sections=( '/',);
@arches=( 'amd64',);

[AEA IT (aea-it)]

Additional repos are on the nvidia repos;

http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu2004/x86_64 /
http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/machine-learning/repos/ubuntu2004/x86_64 /
https://nvidia.github.io/libnvidia-container/stable/ubuntu20.04/amd64 /
https://nvidia.github.io/nvidia-container-runtime/stable/ubuntu20.04/amd64 /

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[James Paton-Smith (jamesps)]

I see similar issues with other 3rd party repos.

It seems a lot of 3rd party repo maintainers don't have a 'dists' directory, or don't follow the general repo structure:
http://apt.example.com/$remoteroot/dists/@dists

Examples:
https://apt.puppetlabs.com/dists/focal/ - Doesn't have a "$remoteroot" directory above "dists" as described in this previous issue: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/debmirror/+bug/1702059

https://download.owncloud.com/desktop/ownCloud/stable/latest/linux/ - Doesn't have a "dists" directory, which is assumed by debmirror to be directly underneath the "$remoteroot" path.

The problem seems to be that debmirror assumes a specific structure for deb repos which isn't always followed by repo maintainers, making it impossible to mirror some repos with debmirror.

[Sven (sacredsheep)]

This also affects the new k8s repos
https://kubernetes.io/blog/2023/08/15/pkgs-k8s-io-introduction/