We’re happy to announce that Debusine can now be used to maintain APT-compatible add-on package repositories for Debian. This facility is available in public beta to Debian developers and maintainers.
Why?
Debian developers typically put most of their effort towards maintaining the main Debian archive. However, it’s often useful to have other places to work, for various reasons:
- Developers working on a set of packages might need to check that changes to several of them all work properly together on a real system.
- Somebody fixing a bug might need to ask affected users to test the fix before uploading it to Debian.
- Some projects are difficult to package in a way that meets Debian policy, or are too niche to include in Debian, but it’s still useful to distribute them in a packaged form.
- For some packages, it’s useful to provide multiple upstream versions for multiple Debian releases, even though Debian itself would normally want to keep that to a minimum.
The Ubuntu ecosystem has had PPAs for a long time to meet these sorts of needs, but people working directly on Debian have had to make do with putting things together themselves using something like reprepro or aptly. Discussions about this have been happening for long enough that people started referring to PPAs for Debian as “bikesheds”, and users often find themselves trying to use Ubuntu PPAs on Debian systems and hoping that dependencies will be compatible enough for things to more or less work. This clearly isn’t ideal, and solving it is one of Freexian’s objectives for Debusine.
Developers publishing packages to Debusine repositories can take advantage of all Debusine’s existing facilities, including a battery of QA tests and regression tracking (coming soon). Repositories are signed using per-repository keys held in Debusine’s signing service, and uploads to repositories are built against the current contents of that repository as well as the corresponding base Debian release. All repositories include automatic built-in snapshot capabilities.
Who can use this service?
We’ve set up debusine.debian.net to allow using repositories. All Debian Developers and Debian Maintainers can log in there and publish packages to it. The resulting repositories are public by default.
debusine.debian.net only allows packages with licences that allow distribution by Debian, and it is intended primarily for work that could reasonably end up in Debian; Freexian reserves the right to remove repositories from it.
How can I use it?
If you are a Debian contributor, we’d be very excited to have you try this out, especially if you give us feedback. We have published instructions for developers on using this. Since this is a beta service, you can expect things to change, but we’ll maintain compatibility where we can.
If you’re interested in using this in a commercial setting, please contact Freexian to discuss what we can do for you.