Gfilui

I am searching for a way to provide a point in time release of a local Ubuntu mirror and came across aptly and repo-snapshots. Both look promising, where aptly seems to win in regards to features and might be the solution in the future.

• 
  repo-snapshot seems to hardlink the .deb files into different folders which opens up a lot of different pool and dists roots which I think makes things confusing.


• 
  aptly being more abstract seems to merge the different packages into a single pool and providing different dists folders/configurations to access the corresponding files. So that looks really promising

For now, I was thinking if it would be possible to just copy the corresponding dists folder containing all the metadata about the selection of the packages at a given time to and use that as suite in my sources.list.

To illustrate this, being in the root of the mirror, there is a pool directory containing all the .deb files, and a dists folder containing all the metadata needed to access the .deb files.

apt-mirror@xenial:~/mirror/ubuntu-mirror/ubuntu$ ls -l 
total 8
drwxrwxr-x 6 apt-mirror apt-mirror 4096 Apr 21 10:42 dists
drwxrwxr-x 3 apt-mirror apt-mirror 4096 Apr 21 09:05 pool

apt-mirror@xenial:~/mirror/ubunut-mirror/ubuntu$ ls -l dists/
total 16
drwxrwxr-x 3 apt-mirror apt-mirror 4096 Apr 21 09:05 xenial

Could one now just copy the dists/xenial folder to e.g. dists/xenial_2018-04-22 and use that as the suite in a sources.list file to reference a package selection at a given time?

deb http://localmirror/mirror/ubuntu-mirror/ubuntu xenial_2018-04-22 main

A quick test did the trick but I am not sure if am missing something or any problems could occur in the future. Sure, you have to take care that .deb files are not deleted from pool/*.