

Show HN: Packagecloud – Hosted Package Repositories - ice799
https://packagecloud.io

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bachmeier
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?

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ice799
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](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=570623)

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catern
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

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serverascode
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.

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chubot
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).

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toomuchtodo
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.

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eropple
I evaluated Gemfury ([https://gemfury.com/](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.

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Moto7451
Neat, on the Perl side of things there's also Stratopan.

[https://stratopan.com](https://stratopan.com)

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

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michaelmior
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.

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

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ErikRogneby
Puppet and Chef support are a nice touch!

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ice799
Thanks!

