Frédéric Pierret

Making use of snapshot.debian.org for fun and profit

snapshot.debian.org is an amazing service hosting the Debian repository contents since 2005. But until now, we have not unlocked the full potential of snapshot.d.o and haven’t used it much beyond retrieving single packages from it using the debsnap tool. This talk is about the tools we have developed during the past year to allow one to:

• reproduce package builds using a buildinfo file for reproducible builds,
• bisecting Debian to figure out when a bug got introduced, and
• create a Debian chroot with exact package versions to reproduce bugs.

In this talk we will give an overview of the utilities and web services that were written and how they can improve Debian development, the obstacles that we faced and how we worked around them, including:

• a new service metasnap.debian.net mapping binary packages to Debian suites and timestamps for GPG verified package retrieval,
• a http caching proxy respecting the download limits of snapshot.d.o, and
• a new testing implementation of snapshot service without throttling https://debian.notset.fr/snapshot