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


CategoryEmdebian