How best to maintain a chroot environment?

[S Scharf]

I am running a server with apache in a chroot jail ( using stable) , and am looking for an easier way to maintain it with security updates.

Jailer seems to want to delete the entire directory and rewirte it for updates. Not practical with all of my server pages in the
chroot tree.

debootstrap intalls an entire distribution, but having login and sysvinit etc. in my chroot jail is overkill.

Is there a (simple) way to just get apt working from inside the chroot jail to update a few packages?
(or failing that dpkg?)

Stuart