External repositories provide application or versions that are not in the official ones. You can find some very interesting stuff there. Most of them are not managed by Debian project.We use the following tags to describe the repositories, to get an idea of the trust you can put in these repositories.
- DD : The repository is managed by a Debian developer or a Debian maintainer
- FLOSS: the repository contains only free/opensource software
- COM: the repository is backed by an external commercial identity. These tags can be combined Here is a list of known places:
- DD, FLOSS, semi official
- Provides packages from Debian testing, recompiled (and sometimes adapted) to run on stable Debian releases.
http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian/
- DD, FLOSS, semi official
Provides avr32, m68k, sh4 and sparc64 ports. There's several known ?DebianPorts/Mirrors.
http://www.debian-unofficial.org/
- DD
- Provides packages not available within the official Debian repository. It contains packages which are not distributable within Debian due to special license terms and packages which are not included in Debian due to political reasons (e.g. patent infringement, binary-only/no sources, or special restrictive licenses).
http://www.debian-multimedia.org/
- DD
- Provides (mostly multimedia) packages for stable/testing/unstable which aren't or can't be in the official distribution (licences...).
https://eurynome.mirbsd.org/debs/ (Repository Index)
- FLOSS
- Provides adapted versions of packages (like mksh, openntpd, rdate) and new packages, including backports to etch/hardy/lenny as the need arises. Inofficial, but tries to produce good quality and standards compliant packages.
The http://apt-get.org/ package search engine, covers many inofficial repositories, but is now outdated.