Reprepro

reprepro is a tool to create and manage debian package repositories. This page documents its installation on stage.maemo.org, the Maemo repository server.


Preparation

Before setting up the repositories, it is a good idea to have a separate partition for the repositories. From the reprepro man pages: "The most annoying problem not yet worked around is database corruption when the disk runs out of space. Ideally put the database on another partition to avoid that." So it seems clear that a large disk is necessary for the package repositories. If one is going to create a replicated repository structure, one can use drbd since that is now included in the linux kernel as of 2.6.33.

reprepro has some dependencies, notably Berkeley DB, and it recommends gnupg-agent and inoticoming. Using inotify and inoticoming to check for incoming packages is also central to the repo system, it's worth noting that inoticoming and reprepro are maintained and even written by the same person.

So, in short, I've installed these packages and their dependencies on the repository server: reprepro, libdb4.2, and inotincoming. (I used this command: aptitude install reprepro inoticoming libdb4.2)


Set up

The first step in creating a repo with reprepo is to create a directory under which the binary deb packages will be stored, along with the data for that set of packages.

   mkdir /srv/extras/
   mkdir /srv/extras-devel/
   mkdir /srv/extras-testing/

In this case we have three directories under which we will have our 'distros'. These high-level directories are specific to Maemo, you can choose to create just one directory or change the names. Here we're putting the directories under the /srv/ directory so that we can isolate them from the rest of our content.


Configuration

To create a configuration file for reprepro, we need to create a "conf" dir for each of our top level directories. So for diablo extras, we'll have a configuration file called /srv/extras/conf/distributions. We can add a configuration for fremantle extras in the same file since you can have multiple distros per configuration. Here is my distribution file for 'diablo':


Origin: maemo.org
Label: Maemo
Suite: extras
Codename: diablo
Version: 0.1
Architectures: i386 armel source
Components: free non-free
Description: Maemo.org package repositories for diablo