Colin Watson announced that Debusine repositories are now available in beta form, which can be used to maintain APT-compatible add-on package repositories for Debian Linux. This comes down to being similar in nature to Personal Package Archives (PPAs) that are popular with Ubuntu Linux.
Debusine repositories are now available in beta form as add-on repositories to the main Debian archive to help in facilitating experimental packages, testing purposes, or toying with other changes to Debian but at least not for now trying to land the changes into the main Debian archive. Some provided examples of intended Debusine usage include:
* When working on a set of packages, one might need to check that changes to several of them all work properly together on a real system.
* When fixing a bug, one might need to ask affected users to test the fix before uploading it to Debian.
* Some projects are difficult to package in a way that meets Debian policy, or are too niche to include in Debian, but it’s still useful to distribute them in a packaged form.
* For some packages, it’s useful to provide multiple upstream versions for multiple Debian releases, even though Debian itself would normally want to keep that to a minimum.
The Debusine site for those interested in this add-on repository concept for Debian Linux can be found at debusine.debian.net.
The Debian Wiki has more details on this new initiative along with the announcement on the mailing list.
