mmdebstrap: unprivileged reproducible multi-mirror Debian chroot in 11 s

Timestamp: 2018-09-19 23:46
Tags: debian

I wrote an alternative to debootstrap. I call it mmdebstrap which is short for multi-mirror debootstrap. Its interface is very similar to debootstrap, so you can just do:

$ sudo mmdebstrap unstable ./unstable-chroot

And you’ll get a Debian unstable chroot just as debootstrap would create it. It also supports the --variant option with minbase and buildd values which install the same package sets as debootstrap would.

A list of advantages in contrast to debootstrap:

• more than one mirror possible (or really anything that is a legal apt sources.list entry)
• security and updates mirror included for Debian stable chroots (a wontfix for debootstrap)
• 2-3 times faster (for debootstrap variants)
• chroot with apt in 11 seconds (if only installing Essential: yes and apt)
• gzipped tarball with apt is 27M small
• bit-by-bit reproducible output (if $SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is set)
• unprivileged operation using Linux user namespaces, fakechroot or proot (mode is chosen automatically)
• can operate on filesystems mounted with nodev
• foreign architecture chroots with qemu-user (without manually invoking --second-stage)

You can find the code here:

https://gitlab.mister-muffin.de/josch/mmdebstrap