Show HN: PkgHub.io - Simple Ubuntu Package Hosting (opens in new tab)

As no one ever heard of this, it is probably not going to last for long, especially if its existence is 100% based on funding by SUSE / The Attachmate Group.

Don't get me wrong but such tools should be vendor-independent unless it targets only the vendor-specific distribution and have a clear business model so it can operate profitable.

Last time I tried to use this. I got annoyed just reading the install docs for running my own 'private' server & gave up.

To Attachmate/Novell/SUSE: Make your software easier to install. Otherwise no one will use it. And you will have to do all the work, which makes me wonder why you bothered open sourcing it at all.

Last time I checked it was very much an RPM-oriented build service, with only very basic support for Debian packages.

Typo on your home page: publically -> publicly

Still trying to figure that bit out at the moment, I suspect we'll go down the Github model, public projects are free, private projects you pay for. Quite open to recommendations/opinions on what people would be willing to pay and how you want that priced

The reason we say "Ubuntu" is that it's all we've had time to test against. I'm pretty sure the way we're presenting the repository metadata will work against Debian et. al., but I haven't tried it.

The goal is to support as many distributions as we can.

I think this is happening because of the.. haphazard way we're showing the file list inside the deb. In future this will be cached. If you refresh again it usually works fine. Cheers for the report.

If you are logged in and view a package (eg. https://pkghub.io/users/limi/projects/snzip/packages/f3d-snz...), there's a download link on the right under 'Meta'. It's just hidden if you are logged out, but the download link itself doesn't require you to be logged in, so you can copy paste that to a terminal (it does seem to lose the filename though, I've logged a bug for this).

How?

The site has promised nothing new that I can see.. Launchpad already offers what is currently being promised.

In addition, the launchpad build infra is well designed and provides an assured build that is using the same architecutrure as builds for Ubuntu's primary archive (including gpg and network isolated build hosts)

Launchpad also has a receipe based build process, that (I haven't tried) could surely tie into Github?

On the face of it, this seems like a fun project for the developers, but nothing new.

Yes, it requires some configuration though.

On the S3 side there is a Ruby gem that will send .deb's up to a bucket and put the right files in the right places.[1]

On the client side, apt-s3[2] provides the functionality for aptitude to download packages from S3 (Remember that S3 doesn't use normal HTTP basic so if you don't want your package public it needs to speak Amazon's language). A few people improved on this, and I have a straightforward fork and PPA built for this.[3]

I've been using all this in production for a few months and it has worked wonderfully. Jenkins builds the package and sends it up via deb-s3 and app servers have chef scripts that stop/start the daemon and update the package.

[1]https://github.com/krobertson/deb-s3

[2]https://github.com/kyleshank/apt-s3

[3]https://launchpad.net/~skye-book/+archive/apt-transport-s3