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

categories: 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

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