mtlynch
commented
1 year ago I spoke with a Debian maintainer this week, and he had some more details on tools for hosting an apt repo.
- apt repo hosting tools are fairly interchangeable because they just spit out a static set of files that apt clients know how to interpret
- If we pick one tool, it's straightforward to switch to another, and the change will be invisible to users
reprepo
- Older tool, but simpler to understand
- Not much development on this tool anymore, but it's still maintained
- Limitation: You can only have one version of each package for each target
- We could still have different versions of the same package for buster and bullseye
aptly
- More modern tool, but a little more complex
PackageCloud
- Managed apt hosting
I've been shying away from maintaining our own apt repo because it's just one more thing to maintain, but it might be easier than I fear.
This article makes it look pretty easy:
https://earthly.dev/blog/creating-and-hosting-your-own-deb-packages-and-apt-repo/
As an exercise, explore how feasible it would be to stand up an apt repository. The ideal for me would be that if the repository is just a Backblaze (or other static host) bucket, and CircleCI jobs push packages / indexes to the bucket as things get tagged as releases or merged into the main branch.
This is how nextdns publishes their Debian packages to S3:
https://github.com/nextdns/nextdns/blob/25396c2329e743abbb1a0f1218b67cd9a472ec89/.github/workflows/release.yml#L45