We distribute our software via custom debian apt repositories we create with reprepro. (Disclaimer: I'm not the release engineer who set this up; he's no longer with us.)
We have four repos: unstable --> lab --> alpha --> prod
We have done a reprepro pull lab which pulled all updates in unstable through to lab. The problem is we now do not want to push all those updates to alpha -- so we need to undo the pull to lab.
The standard way to handle this in reprepro would be to create snapshots of the repos before you make changes to them. The scripts set up by our previous RE have not made any snapshots since 2009.
I've been unable to find any other way to "unpull" the lab repo. The "recovery" file in the local documentation talks about recovering from a corrupted "packages.db". This appears to be what we want to do, but manually rolling back the changes to the Releases and Packages files, and then following the instructions to recreate the packages.db from the dists directory does not seem to work. (I get empty Packages files.)
Is there anything else we can do?
