Show HN: Packagecloud – Hosted Package Repositories | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Packagecloud – Hosted Package Repositories

packagecloud.io

45 pointsice79917 comments

Who is supposed to be willing to pay for this? Is it intended as a replacement for apt on Debian-based systems?

It says "apt, yum, and rubygems repositories without the headaches". If I'm already using apt repositories without headaches, is this not for me?

Are you running your own apt repositories?

Hi!

Just for fun: man reprepro and search for 'corrupt' :)

You can use all your normal tools to upgrade, install, and remove packages as you normally would. So, for, Debian-based systems, apt-get upgrade, install, remove, etc all work as you expect.

We provide SSL, gpg, and fine-grained access control all out of the box. Fine-grained access control doesn't really exist with reprepro or createrepo or other tools and you'd have to build it yourself.

Also, you don't need to worry about backups, the numerous bugs in all the repo creation tools, and we have chef and puppet modules to help deploy this across your infrastructure.

We have support for multiple linux distributions in a single repo (quite a pain to deal with yourself) and best of all we also support pushing multiple versions of a single package to a repo -- something that reprepro does not support, but has been in progress for ~4 years [1].

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=570623

I'm not a fan of this approach. Why did you build new, proprietary software instead of adding that feature to reprepo, for example? Why is packagecloud.io not giving back to the open source community when it's based on packaging tools developed for open source software? The fact that your software is proprietary means when you disappear, so does my infrastructure. I certainly don't like giving up basic user freedoms in the area of software packages, which has historically been open source.

Edit: to be less snarky

DevOps here. I think you're stuck in market segment purgatory. SaaS/PaaS exist to remove pain points. People are either going to go PaaS (Heroku) or they're going to roll their own in AWS/Digital Ocean/etc.

I've already thought to myself, "I could roll this into the open source packages in question in 2-4 weeks in time, give back to the community, AND it helps my reputation." Consider how many others out there have seen this and thought the same.

As a tech professional, I don't think you're going to find much demand. As an entrepreneur, I wish you the best.

This is aimed at the people who think AWS is well priced and outsourcing every part of your infrastructure makes you more hip/agile/"safe"

Check out my above comment and feel free to ping me via email or twitter. Would love to get more detailed feedback from you and maybe try to change your mind!

Sorry but you're barking up the wrong tree. I use reprepro to host gpg signed packages (accessed over ssh so no ssl required) deployed from a vcs repo. The setup of the repo server itself is even handled through an apt package (hows that for self bootstrapping)

Even if I were interested, the obsession with ridiculous pricing structures means I could never use your service. Seriously how does 1 5mb package cost you more than 5 1 mb packages.

$100 a month gets me a hell of a lot of resources to host packages, and funnily enough it doesn't stop working or demand more money because the package count hit some arbitrary number.

I am using it, works great. I tried a couple other similar services and they were slightly more complicated than I wanted--packagecloud is simple and straightforward. Also I like the clean design of the site.

Aren't most package repositories just static HTTP file servers? I know that apt repositories are. They just rsync directory trees and run Apache with a basic configuration to serve them.

If so, it should be pretty straightforward to make an AMI or other machine image that does this (and I'd be surprised if it doesn't exist).

Some repos are even hosted right out of S3 statically (Amazon Linux and Ubuntu in AWS come to mind).

host us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com is an alias for us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com.s3.amazonaws.com.

us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com.s3.amazonaws.com is an alias for s3-1-w.amazonaws.com.

I evaluated Gemfury (https://gemfury.com/) not too long ago for Localytics, and I'll say the same thing to you that I did them: support Maven repos and we will write large checks.

Neat, on the Perl side of things there's also Stratopan.

https://stratopan.com

I'm guessing there are a few other similar platform specific services out there as well.

Looks cool, but it would be really nice to see upfront what types of repositories are supported. It seems that it's currently Debian packages, RPMs, and gems, but I'm not sure because there wasn't a list anywhere.

Nice! I could see myself paying for such a service, if the need should arise in the future.

Puppet and Chef support are a nice touch!

Thanks!

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