Linux

Obtainium but for Debian, nice

If I'd decide to implement something like this, I'd consider two options: local repo with file:// scheme or custom apt-transport. HTTP server is needless here. (But I'll never do this because I prefer to rebuild packages myself if there's no repo for my distro.)

Sorry to be that guy, but this sounds like a cybersecurity nightmare. While everybody was busy to come up with schemes that make absolutely sure that only trusted sources can update a system to avoid having malicious players push their code to users, this one just takes any rando's pile of whatever and injects it straight into the system's core? Like, that doesn't sound like a good idea.

Neat! Thanks for sharing!

This might be for the better, but Discord was so infuriating about updates and forcing you to download them what felt like 50% of the time I opened it, I gave up and just use it in Ungoogled Chromium now. I'm pretty sure within a few months I ended up having 15+ debs of Discord in my Downloads folder.

For anyone else trying to use the native Discord app on Debian, I think they'll find this a major treat.

Looks great, well done.

Personally, the deb-related annoyance that I have encountered most often in recent years is that there is an APT repo but I have to jump thru hoops to add it. An example is signal-desktop, where the handy one-click installation goes like this:

# 1. Install our official public software signing key:
wget -O- https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt/keys.asc | gpg --dearmor > signal-desktop-keyring.gpg
cat signal-desktop-keyring.gpg | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/signal-desktop-keyring.gpg > /dev/null

# 2. Add our repository to your list of repositories:
echo 'deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/signal-desktop-keyring.gpg] https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt xenial main' |\
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list

# 3. Update your package database and install Signal:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install signal-desktop

Why does Debian-Ubuntu not provide a simple command for this? Yes there is add-apt-repository but for some reason it doesn't deal with keys. I've had to deal with this PITA on multiple occasions, what's up with this?

I like it. Wonder if this could be retooled to work on rpm-ostree systems, because any layered packages installed from RPM files have the same limitation of needing to be manually upgraded.

Is that autotiling on cinnamon? Didn't know it could do that

Great idea!

This is somewhat re-inventing some things Ansible can do, which is download and install software whether it has a formal or informal source.

Ansible is the automation I use to manage personal and professional servers.

Neat project!

While this might not solve all of your use cases, did you consider a tool like mise?

Theres a number of other options out there such as asdf-vm and others who's names I can't recall. I recently moved from asdf to miss but its a great way to install things on different machines and track it with your dotfiles, or any other repo you want to use. Mise has tons of configuration options for allowing overrides and local machine specific versions.

It won't tie into apt for your upgrades but you could just alias your apt update to include && mise up.

Willing to give this a go. My go-to for getting non-repo debs automatically has been deb-get which works well but seems susceptible to issues when changes in the software it lists causes it to break and whilst the fix itself is usually made pretty quickly, it seems to go long periods of time between PR merges and releases (which includes adding new software). If this is a viable replacement for it then i'd love to start using it.

I would test this out on termux. It's annoying to have very limited supported programs.