Re: Debian private repositories
* Marc Haber <mh+debian-enterprise@zugschlus.de> [120502 21:36]:
> I would like to know if and how you handle wishes of departments to
> keep older versions of software around and aptable. Afaik, reprepro
> cannot handle archives that have multiple versions of a program in the
> same distribution/suite and cannot be easily adapted to handle this.
Indeed, that functionality is not yet there and will not be there
before the next big database reorganisation.
But note that multiple versions will not solve every problem yet.
Installing and older version when newer versions are available
with apt-get can mean you need to explicitly list all dependencies
with versions in the case of interrelasted packages.
> It is, however, frequently demanded in enterprise that one needs to be
> able to newly deploy a machine using old software to care for
> reproducibility.
If you want full reproducibility, you can use snapshots to
freeze one state of a distribution in a apt-gettable way.
But security updates should be more important than full
reproducibility. So your workflow should really have some way
to update stuff.
When having multiple computers with the same software installed,
I have successfully used additional distributions with exactly
those packages in it those machines should get. Due to using
a pool/, all that adds is the size of the dists/ directory
(and about the same size in db/).
So having a distribution for each deployment gives you both
the ability to update stuff and to keep it at some known level.
(Though note that the Berkeley DB reprepro uses does not scale
very well in the number of databases, so if you have several
hundred distributions, it might make more sense to split that
and have some hardlinks in pool/).
Bernhard R. Link
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