Feature #9487: Research what solution to use for the freezable APT repository

Feature #9487

Research what solution to use for the freezable APT repository

Added by intrigeri 2015-05-28 15:24:49 . Updated 2016-03-25 22:17:18 .

Status:

Resolved

Priority:

High

Assignee:

Category:

Infrastructure

Target version:

Tails_2.3

Start date:

2013-09-26

Due date:

% Done:

100%

Feature Branch:

Type of work:

Research

Blueprint:

Starter:

Affected tool:

Deliverable for:

269

Description

The first step is to specify when we want to import foreign packages into which suites, propose something and lead this discussion to a conclusion. Then we can evaluate if we can use reprepro, have a look at aptly and at what other are doing it.

Subtasks

Feature #6295: Evaluate consequences of importing large amounts of packages into reprepro

Resolved

100

Feature #7427: Evaluate using aptly

Resolved

100

Feature #6906: Ask the Grml people how they handle the "keep lots of source packages around" problem

Resolved

100

Feature #9488: Specify how we want to sync packages from Debian

Resolved

100

Related issues

Related to Tails - ~~Feature #9508~~: Evaluate freezable APT repo's storage needs

Resolved

2015-05-30

History

#1 Updated by intrigeri 2015-05-28 15:25:04

blocks #8668 added

#2 Updated by intrigeri 2015-05-28 15:33:20

Description updated

#3 Updated by intrigeri 2015-05-28 15:37:41

#4 Updated by intrigeri 2015-05-28 15:46:04

Target version changed from Tails_2.3 to 246

#5 Updated by intrigeri 2015-05-30 13:42:20

related to ~~Feature #9508~~: Evaluate freezable APT repo's storage needs added

#6 Updated by intrigeri 2015-05-30 19:03:22

Kali’s solution seems to be more appropriate for a rolling distro (based on Debian testing) and a bit too heavyweight for our use case.

Tanglu’s solution is powered by rapidumo, aka. “Tanglu Archive Tools Collection Tools and services to handle the Tanglu archive, working together with dak and Debile/Jenkins”. It indeed wraps a lot of stuff that mostly makes sense for a non-Live distro that manages a full fork of the Debian archive, rebuilds packages, etc. (many things we don’t do).

=> My current opinion on this topic is that both Kali’s and Tanglu’s solutions are not what we need, and using them would take a lot of time.

#7 Updated by intrigeri 2015-05-31 08:34:03

intrigeri wrote:
> * Kali (reprepro + britney for co-installability):

Update: Kali indeed uses a slightly patched britney, plus a nice Python script+lib that translates britney’s heidi results into calls to reprepro (I now have that code, not sure if I can publish it). In practice, co-installability checks would mostly (only?) be useful to us when we’re frozen and we pull some selected package update into our current snapshot of the Debian archive. Such updates will in most cases come from the security archive, or from stable updates / proposed-updates, and should cause no co-installability problems. Also, even if there were co-installability problems:

for packages shipped in Tails, we would notice at ISO build time;
for additional packages installed by users, oh well, we’re already introducing such problems ourselves with our APT pinning anyway.

=> I still think we should not bother about it.