I watched the office hours, wanted to comment about the how the DEB and RPM repo work. So, at the base a DEB or RPM repo is just a tree of files exposed via HTTP (or FTP). There are some metadata files that list which files are present and where they are, plus optionally signing information. These are all things that could theoretically be done by a chain of other commands, so it doesn’t necessarily need a specific tool. There are text files, gzipped files, xml (maybe the most annoying), etc. Nonetheless as a helper to build the repo for DEB we use

freight

https://github.com/freight-team/freight and for RPM the more official

createrepo_c

https://github.com/rpm-software-management/createrepo_c

freight

does not seem to be developed anymore; I’m not sure if this is an issue right now. I think it was chosen mainly because with a command you tell it to add a new package file to the repo and it does everything for you, including signing the metadata of the repo (not the packages); this is configured in

freight.deb.conf

For RPM we use

createrepo_c

as mentioned before, which does something similar.

Thank you for the write up. I’ve added it to the notes