Package: aptly Version: 1.3.0-5~bpo9+1 Severity: wishlist Dear Maintainer,
When using aptly to publish a package repository, some of the metadata fields in the Packages and/or Sources files are written in an unpredictable (and probably non-deterministic) order. This is mildly annoying because it makes it difficult to compare two versions of the file (e.g., with diff). Example: $ apt-get source hello $ aptly repo create foo $ aptly repo add foo hello_2.10-1.dsc $ aptly publish repo -distribution foo -skip-signing foo debian $ grep '^[A-Z]' .aptly/public/debian/dists/foo/main/source/Sources Package: hello Binary: hello Version: 2.10-1 Maintainer: Santiago Vila <sanv...@debian.org> Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 9.20120311) Architecture: any Standards-Version: 3.9.6 Format: 3.0 (quilt) Directory: pool/main/h/hello Files: Package-List: Homepage: http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/ Checksums-Sha1: Checksums-Sha256: Checksums-Sha512: $ aptly publish drop foo debian $ aptly publish repo -distribution foo -skip-signing foo debian $ grep '^[A-Z]' .aptly/public/debian/dists/foo/main/source/Sources Package: hello Binary: hello Version: 2.10-1 Maintainer: Santiago Vila <sanv...@debian.org> Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 9.20120311) Architecture: any Standards-Version: 3.9.6 Format: 3.0 (quilt) Directory: pool/main/h/hello Files: Homepage: http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/ Checksums-Sha256: Checksums-Sha512: Checksums-Sha1: Package-List: Notice that the order of the last five fields has changed, even though the repository has not been modified in any way. The same problem occurs with Packages files, but less often (typically, only the 'Homepage' and 'Multi-Arch' fields are randomly swapped.) -- System Information: Debian Release: 9.5 APT prefers stable APT policy: (990, 'stable'), (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-debug'), (500, 'unstable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-8-amd64 (SMP w/40 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages aptly depends on: ii bzip2 1.0.6-8.1 ii gnupg1 1.4.21-4+deb9u1 ii gpgv1 1.4.21-4+deb9u1 ii libc6 2.24-11+deb9u3 ii xz-utils 5.2.2-1.2+b1 aptly recommends no packages. Versions of packages aptly suggests: ii graphviz 2.38.0-17 -- debconf-show failed