Re: [PATCH v2 00/10] Introduce local apt repo to cache upstream debian packages for offline usage

[Baurzhan Ismagulov <ibr@radix50.net>]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2018 at 06:14:56PM +0200, Henning Schild wrote:
> i am kind of missing some context here. Is this really just a cache to
> remove deb fetching from the build and allow offline builds? Or is this
> somehow targeting reproducable builds?
> 
> If the latter is true i would like to see a summary of the earlier
> discussions, a detailed description of what is happening and why.

Yes, this is just a cache to allow offline builds. And yes, this is a small
step 0 towards reproducibility.

As I see it, previous discussions boil down to:

1. Doing automatic reproducibility right is complex and should be done in
   steps.

2. Initial caching is a low-hanging fruit that can be addressed now and is
   better than nothing.

This series provides (2).

For (1), I suggest to introduce a mechanism first. It should be usable
manually. It should start from minimal essential use cases (initial creation)
and be possibly extended to further use cases (update all, update single,
update single with deps, remove, etc.) as necessary. If desired, we could look
at optionally building it into the workflow of Isar after the mechanism
stabilizes (with policies such as automatically fetch on the first build,
update on every build, etc.). We can provide more details along the way.

On a related note, we've discussed these issues at ELCE. libapt and python-apt
seem to be what we need for the implementation.

With kind regards,
Baurzhan.