Greetings,

Looking at

https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-ports/

it seems debian-ports was not updated for almost half a year now. If
that was just an error, please fix it. If it was discontinued by
intention, please place according notices - or better, re-consider your
decision: For release architectures, there's at least archive.d.o to
access some older versions of packages, although in a two-year interval
only. For the ports, there's plain nothing.

    Christoph

Christoph Biedl wrote...

Having snapshots of the debian ports is important to me. As there was no
officical reaction of any kind, I've started running my own archive,
using filesystem snapshots. However, I do not intend to make this a
public service as I lack the ressources to do this in a sane way, also
this would only be understood as a competition, life is to short for
that.

It you, future reader, need access to a particular file, drop me a line.
As processing will have to be done by hand, answers might take a while.

    Christoph

On Wed, 31 Jan 2024 07:44:57 +0100 Christoph Biedl  <debian.axhn@manchmal.in-ulm.de> wrote:
 > Christoph Biedl wrote...
 >
 > > Looking at
 > >
 > > https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-ports/
 > >
 > > it seems debian-ports was not updated for almost half a year now. If
 > > that was just an error, please fix it. If it was discontinued by
 > > intention, please place according notices - or better, re-consider your
 > > decision: For release architectures, there's at least archive.d.o to
 > > access some older versions of packages, although in a two-year interval
 > > only. For the ports, there's plain nothing.
 >
 > Having snapshots of the debian ports is important to me. As there was no
 > officical reaction of any kind, I've started running my own archive,
 > using filesystem snapshots. However, I do not intend to make this a
 > public service as I lack the ressources to do this in a sane way, also
 > this would only be understood as a competition, life is to short for
 > that.
 >
 > It you, future reader, need access to a particular file, drop me a line.
 > As processing will have to be done by hand, answers might take a while.

I also have this problem, and I've also started to archive packages for
ports architectures that I actively use. Having to resort to this is
very unfortunate. The snapshot.debian.org service is extremely useful
for the ports especially as many ports regularly break newer package
versions due to intermittent FTBS issues that cause the 'all' packages
to be out of sync with the arch-specific ones.
Having access to the recent history on snapshot.debian.org means that
you can fetch the matching 'all' package version and fix the problem.

If it's an issue of the ports architectures taking up too much disk
space on Debian's servers, then maybe limit the history of the ports
archive, but please keep it up to date.
Though if I can afford the disk space on my home NAS then maybe the
Debian project also could afford it and this is just a glitch. I'm
hopeful. :)

- Erik

The snapshot infrastructure currently can't cope with -ports imports,
as they take longer than the interval between pushes, for reasons.
We'll turn it back on when we can.

Cheers,
Julien

Julien Cristau wrote...

Thanks for the update. If you think people can help you with that,
please let us know.

My current archive has sufficient capacity until the end of the year.

    Christoph

Christoph Biedl wrote...
concerns for the future. There is still a gap of approximately ten
months, I'm in contact with the snapshot people to handle this.

For the seond period (January 2024 until May) there should be little losses, or
even none.

For the first (July 2023 until January 2024) there is at least metadata
of the pool directories. We'll make that available although this will
not be apt'able due to missing Packages files.

Allow me a few more weeks until I can find the time to implement this.

    Christoph

Hi Christoph,

Were you able to look into restoring some of the lost period of snapshots
for debian-ports? I've found a Debian derivative, MintPPC, that currently
seems to only be usable with snapshots from between Sep 2023 and Jan 2024,
so it would be very helpful.

Thanks,
vasi