Helping your users use your repository
To use your repository, users will have to add it to their /etc/apt/sources.list Or do they...? Not if you use falcon! Falcon has a plugin that will create a .deb package for you that contains a sources.list.d file and data for app-install.app-install?
Ubuntu introduced the gnome-app-install/adept-installer concept, a richer form of displaying GUI applications for installation. To feed this application data about your repository, users can install a package containing this data.How to create
Falcon has a plugin that will create these packages automatically for you. Just enable this plugin and the package will automatically be created, updated and linked from the generated webpages. If you already installed packages into your repository before enabling this plugin, you need to populate its cache "manually" with the falcon shell:dennis@blackbird:~$ falcon shell >>> falcon.plugins.app_install.generate_cache()
Caveats
The plugin is not perfect. It does not contain bugs per se but you have to remember the following:- The generated sources.list will contain a randomly selected mirror
- Desktop/image files are only updated when new upstream versions of packages are found
- The devscripts package needs to be installed for this plugin to work
- The package is not automatically installed in your repository (yet!)