How to setup a trivial archive

The "trivial archive" lacks support for apt-pinning and modern secure APT due to the collision of 2 types of Release files. (e.g., old "Debian Reference (sarge)" and "APT HOWTO (sarge)")

You need dpkg-scanpackages which is in dpkg-dev

add this line to /etc/apt/sources.list

  deb file:/path/to directory ./

Create a directory for the deb files. (for exemple /root/deb)

export REPO=/root/deb
mkdir $REPO

Then every time you put new files in the directory, you'll have to scan the directory and update aptitude.

cp *.deb $REPO
cd $REPO
dpkg-scanpackages . | gzip > Packages.gz
aptitude update

Then you can install the package.