Re: apt-ftparchive alternatives

[Vincent Danjean <vdanjean.ml@free.fr>]

  Hi,

Le 03/11/2025 à 19:50, Jeremy Stanley a écrit :
> On 2025-11-03 13:41:07 -0500 (-0500), nick black wrote:
> [...]
> > i've used reprepro for most of this kind of thing (and more) for maybe twenty years.
>
> Oh, great idea, thanks! I do already use reprepro for partial mirroring (and have for similarly long), but never thought about using it to create wholly new repositories from a loose collection of debs and source packages.

  I've also been using reprepro for a very long time.
However, a few months ago, I used "apt-ftparchive release" in order to generate release files for a updated DVD-1 install media (official DVD media + a few more packages and their dependencies + packages in security and trixie-update).
Importing the whole DVD into a reprepro repo (4GB of duplicated packages) would be a serious problem with respect to disk space use.

Moreover, several docs (on our official website) talk about apt-ftparchive when updating/creating media images.
If "apt-ftparchive" becomes deprecated, it will be required to update these docs.

  Regards,
    Vincent

> My main concern with reprepro for that purpose is that its state database can be a bit of a bear, but I could probably just blow it away every time and pretend it's stateless.
>
> I also don't need a complicated pool setup like the official package repositories, but I guess having one isn't that big of a deal (even if I'd prefer everything in a single flat directory for this use case, like I get with apt-ftparchive). Or maybe reprepro can do that too and I've just never noticed...