I had a bit of a surprise today when I sat down to read this weeks DWN and found my own name and a link to and old post about some Lightweight Debian Archive Scripts that I had written in October last year staring back at me from the second sentence!

As chance would have it, just last week I updated these scripts to use reprepro, as suggested in many of the comments that I received after writing the last post. I hadn’t got around to making the new scripts public yet, so I guess the link from DWN is a sign of sorts!

My main motivation for updating the scripts to use reprepro was to give myself the ability to have a testing, and stable archive as recently we’ve been dealing with .debs manually for testing as we didn’t want to put them into the archive for fear of prematurely updating the production hosts with untested code. I’d heard that reprepro had some nice support for moving packages between local repositories which sounded exactly like what I wanted.

Reprepro was indeed fairly easy to setup and install. I backported reprepro 0.9.1 and installed it alongside my existing sbuild setup as documented in the original post.

The changes to the scripts were fairly minimal, although again, they assume some things for my environment, and its likely that they’ll need some modification before being useful to you:

• process_packages assumes you have pairs of distributions named like ‘foo’ and ‘foo-testing’. Every package picked up from incoming/foo is automatically added into foo-testing after it is successfully built
• add-packages is mostly redundant, used only to add packages manually if the automatic insertion fails because reprepro has got itself confused

You can grab the updated scripts and my reprepro configuration from:

• process_packages - Runs from cron to build new packages and add them to the -testing archive
• add-packages - Manually adds packages
• distributions - Reprepro distributions file
• options - Reprepro options file
• pulls - Reprepro pulls file

The new setup is great and I’m very happy with reprepro and the new archive. The only thing I haven’t had time to look into properly yet is how to pull specific packages from testing into stable, but not everything. Ideally I would be able to run a command like

reprepro <stable-dist> pull <pkgname>

If I could get that working then it would be awesome.