Re: Debusine repositories now in beta
Hi Colin,
On Wed, Dec 17, 2025 at 5:06 PM Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> wrote:
> Following on from the talk I gave at DebConf [1], we're happy to
> announce that Debusine can now be used to maintain APT-compatible add-on
> package repositories for Debian (i.e. PPAs for Debian!). This facility
> is available in public beta to Debian developers and maintainers.
This is fantastic - thank you!
> 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.
Terrific - a few questions below..
> When publishing packages to Debusine repositories, you can take
> advantage of all Debusine's existing facilities, including a battery of
> QA tests and regression tracking (coming soon).
Do you think we could add something for copyright checks, too?
Now, that's vague, and there's probably no deterministic way of
finding things, but even if the pipeline shows all the things it could
catch - perhaps using lrc or something - that'd be fantastic for the
maintainers. We could discuss the specifics later, but wondering if
you'd like to have something like that.
> [...] 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.
Can I copy the package from the "PPA" to the archive? If not already,
d'you think that's something y'all can work on?
I'd love to use these repositories as a playground, and then once I'm
happy, I'd like to be able to just copy it over to the archive instead
of having to re-upload it. Think like ./copy-package in Ubuntu. Would
be extremely helpful during transitions.
> Who can use this service?
> -------------------------
>
> We've set up https://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 d'you feel about extending this to cover various aspects of dak?
Or perhaps integrating with it? I'd like to see if we could
potentially use Debusine for NEW review - accept|reject|prod|etc. All
the existing checks & pipelines provided by Debusine could be pretty
exciting to plug into the dak ecosystem (ideally, just let Debusine
handle everything).
Let me know what you think. Thanks a bunch for your work on this, regardless! o/
- u
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