Debian's APT 2.7 Packaging Tool Begins Rolling Out "Snapshots" Support
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Released on Tuesday was APT 2.7.0 and one of the few new features with this release is initial support for snapshots, as added by Ubuntu/Debian developer Julian Andres Klode.
This is a preliminary implementation for supporting the --snapshot argument and the implementation is subject to change, especially in the near-term prior to APT 2.8.
With supported APT server configurations for snapshots, this feature is intended to allow accessing a "snapshot" of the available packages at a particular point in time. The new documentation cites --snapshot 20220102T030405Z with the timestamp (YYYYMMDDTHHMMSSZ / snapshot ID) for accessing an APT archive snapshot as of 2 January 2022. Related to this initial snapshots code is also adding a --update argument for ensuring the command always installs the latest versions of a given package rather than honoring any snapshot-specified behavior.
More details on the Debian APT snapshot support via this APT merge request introducing the preliminary support that is found in the v2.7 release.
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