Freexian Collaborators: Debusine repositories now in beta (by Colin Watson)

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.