Proget apt snapshot support?

phil.sutherland

We are currently evaluating Proget to possibly replace our existing Sonatype blobstore, and one of the features we currently make of is apt snapshots. The Debian feed documentation in Proget states that apt snapshots are explicitly not supported. Is this functionality on a future roadmap, or is there another way to do this within Proget that we've missed?

atripp

Hi @phil-sutherland_3118 ,

This is not on a roadmap. Honestly we really don't really understand what a "snapshot" repository is or how they are used.

We surveyed some customers about it a while ago, and this summarizes what they said: repository snapshots are archaic; they made sense a long time ago, but Docker changed all that. It's so much simpler to use container images like FROM debian:buster-20230919. That's effectively our snapshot, and when we need to main old releases (which happens more often than I'd like), we just rebuild the image from that. The other big advantage is that build time is easily 10x faster if not more.

And then we saw that Debian also to maintains their own snapshots (https://snapshot.debian.org/), so we don't quite get how they are used outside of a handful of use cases (like a build process for a specialized appliance OS without Docker).

Anyway we're open to considering it.... but only two people (including you) have asked in the past several years, so there's no real interest... and we're not sure what they even do :)

That said, it's possible there's a way to accomplish something that has the same outcomes. For example:

create a public aggregate feed (jammy-all) with multiple connectors to Debian, Ubuntu, NGINX, Elasticsearch, etc.
create a release feed (jammy-20231101) that snapshots jammy-all

But we don't know enough to answer that :)

Thanks,
Alana

phil.sutherland

Thanks for the comprehensive response - which was very helpful.
Closing the loop, we've elected for the short term to run up a parallel aptly server to manage our existing apt snapshots, but in the longer term we'll revisit how we use snapshots at all and very likely will switch our process to use upstream provided snapshots.