DataLad extension for working with Debian packages and package repositories
This software wraps building and disseminating Debian packages in a standard data management task. While there is no shortage of specialized software solutions for Debian package workflows and archives, here, the general purpose data management solution DataLad is used to present all involved steps as a system that tracks inputs, and converts them to outputs, with full capture of actionable provenance information for all respective transformations. Importantly, the system is fully decentralized and whole processes and/or individual steps can be performed by independent collaborators with no required access to a common build or distribution infrastructure.
Features include:
Version control of Debian source packages, and/or provenance capture of generating such source packages from upstream sources
Building Debian binary packages from source packages (reproducibly) in portable, containerized build environments
Maintain collections of source and binary packages built for a given target distribution release, to provide or maintain access to historical build artifacts similar to https://snapshot.debian.org
Generate and update APT package repositories for particular versions of a package collection
This software only implements the data management and provenance tracking features. Specialized tasks, such as repository generation, or building binary packages from source packages are performed using standard solutions such as reprepro, or dpkg
To get a feel for this machinery, see the walk-through. If that sparks your interest, continue with the walk-through on collaborative package distribution for a more conceptual illustration.