Debian Is Making The Process Easier To Bisect Itself Using Their Wayback Machine

For a decade now snapshot.debian.org has been around for accessing old Debian packages and to find packages by dates and version numbers. Only now though is a guide materializing for leveraging this Debian "wayback machine" in order to help in bisecting regressions for the distribution that span multiple/unknown packages.

The bisecting is intended for Debian Sid users of the latest bleeding-edge packages and to helping track down what specific package versions may have introduced a regression. This Debian snapshot archive offers a JSON-based API to query changed packages based upon dates and from there with leveraging Git can make the bisecting manageable.

The new element is the Bisect Debian Wiki page that extensively documents how to work through this process. This documentation should make it easier for helping users bisect Debian issues moving forward.

More details within this month's Debian Misc Developer News mailing list post.