- only download Release files once and not by apt as well as with curl
and thus avoid a mirror push happening between both downloads
- no heuristic needed to place the file in their correct mirror
location
- no manual checksum checking
- only throttle download speed when actually downloading and not when
retrieving files from the cache
- no translation of filenames between how the epoch colon is stored in
files in /var/cache/apt/archives versus how it is stored in files on
the mirrors
- no special handling of stable update and security mirrors
- implemented in Python instead of shell and thus an order of magnitude
faster
- implements the same as debootstrap in
https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/debootstrap/-/merge_requests/71
- builds a temporary usr-is-merged package and upgrades to the real one
- create merged-/usr chroots for unstable and testing (which will
become Debian 12 Bookworm)
- add a dedicated merged-/usr section to the manual page
- multiple individual shell scripts instead of one 3.5k line monster
- tests driven by Python script allowing:
* declarative test description in coverage.txt
* collecting errors instead of aborting on first error
* skipping tests
* running specific tests
