How Emdebian makes a release, using reprepro
reprepro will gain a "read-only" mode for a genuinely frozen distribution, but a few workarounds are necessary with the current version of reprepro.
The problem is that if stable is created within the existing repository, every action to include new or updated packages in the repository or modify repository data, causes the Release files for the *stable* distribution to be touched. This should not happen and it breaks the security signatures on the Release files.
The solution is to put stable into a second repository, all by itself, clearly identified as 'frozen' and then symlink that directory so that apt and similar tools can find it where they expect to find it. Naturally, this means removing stable from the existing repository.
Emdebian Release Plan
Create a frozen directory. Copy conf/distributions into frozen/conf and delete all lines for unstable. Rename testing as stable and remove any existing update and override rules. Generate data for lenny (stable). reprepro -b frozen/ export reprepro -b frozen/ createsymlinks Create an updates file in frozen/conf Name: freeze Method: file://opt/reprepro/grip/ Suite: testing Add updates file to frozen/conf/distributions Update: freeze Update frozen from lenny (testing) in current repository. reprepro -b frozen/ checkupdate reprepro -b frozen/ update we now have a frozen lenny (stable) Delete testing/ symlink in old repo Change lenny in old repo to stable in conf/distributions reprepro export reprepro createsymlinks Pull lenny (testing) in old repo into new squeeze (testing) Remove lenny from old repo conf/distributions rm -rf dists/lenny reprepro --delete clearvanished