CARBinating your Debian-based distro

After far too long with no software released, I've finally gotten together the Perl scripts which I use to manage a software repository on the computer I'm currently using. (I will neglect to go into the backstory here; just read the older blog posts.) I've been running Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft on said computer, but since I don't have an internet connection at home right now, I've had to ferry packages from the library on a USB key drive.

The thing is, I'd rather not just use dpkg to install from the package file itself. This makes some package managers (which are very useful for knowing what you're installing) somewhat grumpy. Instead, I decided that I would build an APT package repository into which I would deposit any packages downloaded.

It's probably nowhere near as sane as the repositories run by the various Debian based distributions, but it works nice. The scripts which build and rebuild it I call Chris' APT Repository Builder, or CARB for short. Documentation is included, and perhaps someone will Debianize it (which, ironically, I didn't bother to do).