Hacker News Reader

Comment by theandrewbailey | Hacker News Reader

> Even better, there is a little-advertised utility called extrepo that has a curated list of external repositories users might want to enable for Debian. To enable the Mozilla repository, for example, a user only needs to install extrepo, run "extrepo enable mozilla" as root (or with sudo), update the package cache, and look for the regular Firefox package. In all, extrepo includes more than 160 external repositories for applications like Docker CE, Signal, and Syncthing. Unfortunately, the extrepo utility does not have a separate "list" command to show the available repositories, though running "extrepo search" with no search parameter will return all of its DEB822-formatted repository entries.

TIL. What a superpower!

View on HN

I was browsing through the issues of extrepo and found deb-get, seems pretty useful too:

> deb-get makes it easy to install and update .debs published in 3rd party apt repositories or made available via direct download on websites or GitHub release pages.

https://github.com/wimpysworld/deb-get/

In particular, the list of software is a bit longer than extrepo (e.g. includes zoom):

https://github.com/wimpysworld/deb-get/blob/main/01-main/REA...

I learned about extrepo when trying out LibreWolf. Then I realized theres plenty of stuff on extrepo I could install. No more curl installs or third-party package sources for me mostly.

This repo has a list of extrepo stuff - https://salsa.debian.org/extrepo-team/extrepo-data/-/tree/ma...

I was thrilled to learn about this, too. I wasn't aware of it even as a long-time Debian user.

However, trying the specific example that was listed in the article, I installed extrepo and enabled the mozilla repo. Unfortunately, firefox is not installable on trixie in it's current form because it depends on libasound2 and the trixie package is called libasound2t64. : (

Wait, what! I have firefox installed through extrepo and it worked well as of yesterday.

That's odd... I had no problem installing Firefox.

In trixie, libasound2 exists as a virtual package (ie. libasound2t64 provides libasound2) so this ought not be a problem.

It should definitely work with an 'apt install firefox' from the cli - perhaps you're using a different package management frontend? If so, installing libasound2t64 first should force it to see the virtual package - but it might be worth filing a bug report as this really shouldn't require manual intervention...

what's the difference with PPAs?

the main reason i always fall back to Ubuntu is bc everyone has a PPA for it. Sometimes the PPA also works for Debian, but its 50/50 (from what i understand its not an official thing under Debian?)

AppImages have aleviated this.. but appimagelauncher is broken under Ubuntu and theyre annoying to integrate manually

I've only used AppImages for software I didn't care about every being updated - can they do updates without having to manually redownload the AppImage?

Yes, but not super straightforward: https://docs.appimage.org/packaging-guide/optional/updates.h...

In one case, none -- extrepo carries a PPA for Trinity desktop: https://salsa.debian.org/extrepo-team/extrepo-data/-/blob/ma...

Generally, these are repos maintained by the upstreams themselves, e.g. Docker, Tor, Armbian, Dovecot... my guess (and it's just a guess, I haven't used Ubuntu PPAs much lately) the PPAs are maintained by not-the-upstreams. Or perhaps some of the upstreams are maintaining both a PPA and their own hosted repo.

Does it enable access to software-properties-common?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com