Libapt

New project started!

I started a new project called libapt. The goal of libapt is to provide a pure Rust library for interfacing with Debian apt repositories. It shall be possible to use libapt to parse an apt repository, get the packages, package metadata, checksums and locations, and verify the validity of the metadata with respect to signatures, compliance with the Debian repository format specification, and existence of packages indices and packages.

Why is is needed?

Debian is a great base for building custom embedded Linux distributions, because it supports a huge amount of architectures, and provides very long support for the packages. This reduces the burden of maintaining an embedded Linux solution a lot.

Unfortunately, the available apt tools are not built for my use case. I want to track in detail what changes over time and I want to do this for apt repositories not configured on my host machine. Libapt shall build the base of a small tool set supporting building of embedded Linux root file systems form apt repositories.