This document summarises what I have found about settling a Debian repository.

I have taken care of providing the most correct information at the time of writing but if you find any inaccuracy, please, fix it.

For a quick and current HOWTO on setting up your own automatic Debian repository see [http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/286 this arcticle on reprepro]. The rest of this page is rather outdated, yet contains much useful information.

In [http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/repository-howto/repository-howto.en.html Aaron Isotton how-to] two kinds of repositories are defined, the trivial repositories (where the user of the repository has to specify an exact path to the packages) and the automatic repositories (that mimic the official Debian repositories where only the base path, distribution and component have to be specified and the apt-get magic occurs). His how-to describes how to setup trivial repositories with dpkg-scansources and dpkg-scanpackages. Such a topic is also covered by [http://www.interq.or.jp/libra/oohara/apt-gettable/apt-gettable/ Oohara Yuuma how-to] and [http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/ch-basico.html#s-dpkg-scanpackages apt how-to].

The settling of automatic repositories is covered by [http://familiasanchez.net/~roberto/howtos/debrepository Roberto Sanchez how-to] who gives relevant scripts. Pools are not covered there.

There are also packaged (or not) tools in Debian in order to perform the task:

?TableOfContents

The following paragraphs contain more info about these applications.

dak (Debian Archive Kit)

reprepro (formerly known as mirrorer)

debpool

debarchiver

mini-dinstall

apt-ftparchive

dpkg-scanpackages and dpkg-scansources