Debian developers now have an official way to publish and test add-on package repositories, as the Debusine project has opened its repository feature in public beta.
The new service, available at debusine.debian.net, allows Debian Developers and Debian Maintainers to create APT-compatible repositories that function similarly to the well-known Ubuntu’s PPAs but are built specifically for the Debian ecosystem.
Debusine itself is a relatively new project within Debian’s infrastructure. It was introduced publicly at DebConf and has been developed to modernize and unify Debian’s internal workflows for package building, testing, and quality assurance. Until now, much of this work has taken place behind the scenes. With the launch of repositories in beta, Debusine is becoming directly usable for day-to-day development tasks.
The motivation behind this new initiative is more practical than anything else. Debian developers often need a place to test coordinated changes across multiple packages, ask users to verify bug fixes before an upload, or distribute software that is not yet ready (or not suitable at all) for inclusion in the main Debian archive.
Until now, this usually meant maintaining custom setups with tools such as reprepro or aptly, or relying on ad hoc solutions. The lack of an official alternative has also led some users to try Ubuntu PPAs on Debian systems, with mixed and often risky results.
Debusine repos are designed to address these gaps. Packages published to them are built against the current contents of the repository as well as the corresponding base Debian release.
Each repository is automatically signed using per-repository keys managed by Debusine’s signing service, and snapshot functionality is enabled by default, allowing developers and users to refer back to previous states of a repository when needed.
Because repositories are built on top of Debusine’s existing infrastructure, they can leverage automated builds and a growing set of quality assurance features. These include integration with standard Debian tooling and plans for more extensive QA and regression tracking as the platform evolves.
Access to the service is currently limited to Debian Developers and Debian Maintainers, and repositories are public by default. Only packages with licenses compatible with Debian’s distribution requirements are permitted, and the service is intended primarily for work that could reasonably make its way into Debian.
For more information, see the announcement on Debian’s mailing list.
For the best privacy and security I don’t like to use PPAs or PPA-like (third party) repositories!
I prefer to have all the software that I need in the main fully open source repository.
Because of that I wish that the Debian maintainers would also build and offer the following projects:
AMDGPU_TOP, Sunshine, Moonlight, LibreWolf, Thorium, Ungoogled-Chromium