Building live images from snapshot.d.o

[Vagrant Cascadian]

On 2026-01-08, Roland Clobus wrote:
> Recently I've started to look again at snapshot.debian.org as an 
> alternative source for generating live images. I've adjusted the 
> building script to make the images between builds as similar as 
> possible, but now there 'only' some timestamps left.
>
> These timestamps are from .deb packages, which are downloaded with the 
> --timestamping option enabled.
> However, the timestamps differ between deb.debian.org and 
> snapshot.debian.org for files with the same content.
...
> Should I normalise the timestamp of the .deb files to the timestamp of 
> data.tar.xz, while builing the live images?
> Or should this be solved 'upstream' in the Debian archive/snapshot 
> archive to preserve/set the timestamps of the .deb files?

Normalizing the snapshot and "master" archive might be nice, but
obviously requires more coordination...

Normalizing the timestamp of the file itself to the embedded timestamp
within the .deb seems fairly reasonable... out of curiosity, does it
correspond to SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH of the package build? e.g. for debian
packages that should be the same as the debian/changelog timestamp, and
thus essentially deterministic...

live well,
  vagrant
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