Hacker News

While being an avid Debian user on both server and desktop, I had never heard of the Extrepo[0] package mentioned in the article. It would be great if the repositories included in there would suggest this way of adding their repo. While it cannot guarantee the safety of added packages, it at least add an extra layer of checks.

Another useful thing from the article for me was `apt modernize-sources` to update the existing sources.list to the new structure. Now I need to check if scripts like this run automatically on my auto-updating desktop from my parents.

[0]: https://packages.debian.org/trixie/extrepo

frumiousirc 6 days ago [ - ]

> apt modernize-sources

What I lack with the "modern" `sources.list.d/` file schema is a command to perform common types of edits. Something like `extrepo` but generic and with knowledge of Debian repos/dists. It's a small thing but I want to be able to type commands like

    apt-sources available # prints known dists, marked by their support status
    apt-sources list         # prints all active dists
    apt-sources add trixie   # or "testing", "unstable", "sid"
    apt-sources remove bookworm
    apt-sources dist-upgrade # combo of the previous two

Perhaps `extrepo` would be extended to include Debian-proper or this hypothetical `apt-sources` would be kept Debian-repo-only or perhaps it would cover extrepo's scope.

wutwutwat 5 days ago [ - ]

Feed your comment into a AI agent prompt and you’ll get back a bash script that does what you need.

frumiousirc 4 days ago [ - ]

Right. I'm still adjusting to the new "make it so" paradigm. Gemini gives a decent first draft for this `apt-sources` script.