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But what does installing things via apt have to do with reproducibility? Does apt have some way to specify lock files or hashsums of the packages it is supposed to install? Or do you mean to pin version numbers of system packages and rely on that? Otherwise apt would be the point where the guarantees go out of the window already.


Debian can pin packages to certain versions by their numbers (see dpkg(1), '--set-selections') and it does verify package integrity. I can't think of any way to pin a package to a hash like with Bazel or Nix, but the expectation is that packages are not changed after publication in dpkg repositories - and for Debian itself, that expectation is a strictly-followed rule.

Therefore I would trust package pinning to work, but it's not quite as straightforward for the end-user as unique package hashes as identifiers.




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