Repository Management Software

While it is theoretically possible to manually maintain a Debian repository, it is very error-prone and tedious work in practice. So instead, several software projects exist that can create and update repositories for us.

There are tools for mirroring existing repositories, which we won’t talk about here in detail, but we can find a list of mirroring tools in the Debian Wiki.

Here, we are interested in tools that allow us to insert our custom-built Debian packages into a repository we control.

Tools for adding a package to a repository

These tools come in two flavors.

• One group of tools works with an incoming queue or directory, where developers can deposit their (typically signed) packages, which then are processed asynchronously. Tools in this category include dak, mini-dak, debarchiver, and mini-dinstall.