Debian Packages

Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it.

Linus Torvalds

I maintain Debian packages for much of the software that I maintain, as well as for some other packages that I personally use. The packages of general interest I upload directly to Debian; they can be obtained from the current unstable or testing distribution. See also my Debian QA package overview, which includes considerable additional information for those packages in Debian proper, including the versions in each separate distribution, the current bug counts, Lintian reports, package upload history, and quite a bit more. This is one of the nicest features of Debian.

For more information on how I maintain packages, see my Debian notes page.

I am a member of the Debian Policy team, a largely inactive co-maintainer of Lintian, and try to help with other teams as I have time (particularly the Perl packaging team), although I haven't had time in a while. I unfortunately have a lot of demands on my time and can't do as much for Debian as I'd ideally like, but every once in a while I manage to help. Note that various Perl packages and some other co-maintained packages will show up in my QA summary even if I'm not particularly active in maintaining those at present.

Installing

For packages in Debian, you can download and install them like any other package in Debian. If you are running Debian stable and want to install one of the packages from unstable or testing, you may have to download and build the source with apt-get --build source.

For the other packages, the easiest way to install them is via apt from my personal repository. Add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

    deb https://archives.eyrie.org/debian sid main non-free contrib

Change sid to the specific name of the distribution you're running if you're not running unstable. unstable, testing, stable, and oldstable will also work but are not recommended since they change meanings during releases. Most packages will be uploaded only to sid and copied to the current testing distribution. Architecture-independent packages will also be pulled into the current stable unless there's a reason not to do so. During a release, I'll split the testing repository off of unstable and then promote it to the new stable, similar to how Debian does it.

For older versions of Debian, you will need to install the apt-transport-https package if you don't already have it installed, since the repository is only available via HTTPS. (Current versions of apt support HTTPS out of the box.)

You will then need install the eyrie-archive-keyring package to enable the archive key (and accept an untrusted installation of that package). If you want to configure the archive key first rather than trust the first download, download the repository signing key and feed it into apt-key add:

    apt-key add < debian.gpg.txt

This must be run as root. The archive key is B2773B4FFD21DB71, which is signed with my personal key, which is part of the Debian keyring and the strongly-connected PGP web of trust.

My packages are (at least for the time being) only built on i386 and amd64, and not all packages are available for i386. If you have another platform, or if you just want to see the source packages, add:

    deb-src https://archives.eyrie.org/debian sid main non-free contrib

with the same change of sid to something else as appropriate. You can then build packages for your local architecture with apt-get --build source.

If you want to get to these .deb packages without using apt-get, you can also browse my repository via HTTPS and find the .deb files in a subdirectory named after the source package.

Packages Not in Debian

I maintain the following packages, both upstream and the Debian packaging, and plan to include them in Debian proper, but haven't had a chance yet:

libnews-gateway-perl Robomoderation and mail to news gatewaying toolkit

Likewise for the following packages where I maintain Debian packaging but not the upstream software:

libnewslib-perl Perl modules for NNTP and Usenet article manipulation

The following packages for my software may or may not ever be uploaded to Debian proper, depending on how generally useful they seem to others, but will be maintained in my personal repository:

calvin-chatserv Simple multi-channel chat server
eyrie-archive-keyring APT keyring for the eyrie.org Debian repository
eyrie-utilities Utility scripts for eyrie.org systems
eyrie-wordlist Wordlist for CrackLib
kadmin-remctl remctl interface for Kerberos kadmin functions
reminder Remind of upcoming tasks with confirmation
svnlog Mail Subversion commit notifications
wallet Kerberos-authenticated secure data management

The following packages are local hacks of packages also found in Debian. You almost certainly want to just use the Debian version.

popa3d-homedir Rebuild of popa3d with eyrie.org defaults and mail in home directories

From time to time, I also may upload backports to the current stable distribution to my personal repository when for one reason or another they're not appropriate for the backports.debian.org repository.

Last modified and spun 2023-12-30