Package: python3-debian Version: 0.1.49 Severity: wishlist I've trying to figure out how to build a specialized repository mirroring tool as part of debusine (https://freexian-team.pages.debian.net/debusine/), and I started by looking at python-debian. First I ran into https://bugs.debian.org/710923, which would be an issue - past experience with https://bugs.debian.org/918304 suggests that that's much harder to get right than it seems. But, assuming that that could be solved somehow, I then started thinking about what would be needed next.
After verifying the Release file, a mirroring tool needs to fetch the next level of index files (typically Packages and Sources). python-debian offers very little help with this - you get a parsed version of the various checksums fields, but that's about it - and there are some non-trivial complications here. For instance, https://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/InRelease lists checksums for main/binary-amd64/Packages, but those are the checksums you get after fetching a compressed version of the file and uncompressing it; the uncompressed version isn't actually on the mirror, and you have to fetch https://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/main/binary-amd64/Packages.xz or similar instead. While I have a rough idea of how to implement this and could borrow code from apt, I don't really want to have to write more versions of this than necessary. Ideally (for me), Release would have some way to list the next-level index files, and provide a way to fetch checksum-verified versions of them given a base URL, parsed into Packages/Sources instances as appropriate, and abstracting over all the details of compression algorithms and such. I think I may end up using apt or python-apt for now, but python-apt is always a slightly awkward dependency in a Python codebase due to its tight coupling with apt, and python-debian is much more convenient in those terms. Thanks, -- Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@debian.org]
