This would enable resuming downloads, and providing progress bars.

• Support automatically generating and appending an entry to a package's changelog (debchange)
• Support repacking a remote deb archive with an updated changelog

[ ] Support capability to determine what packages were changed between the last dists update
[ ] Insert details into the dists file at the correct location, rather than regenerating them from scratch

Recently, the tool has gained support for generating the Contents archives in parallel. Similar logic can also be used for generating the Packages archives, which is currently handled by apt-ftparchive. The issue is that apt-ftparchive does not process Debian archives in parallel, so it can take a bit of extra time to process all the archives one by one.

• Generate Packages for each architecture
• Generate Release for each architecture
• Generate Release for a suite
• Generate Sources

Before initiating the parallel process, we should create a list of archives to process in advance, with older versions of a package filtered out.

Simply run quilt push until no more patches can be applied, if the debian details are using quilt.

The CPI will require launchpad support to fetch package versions / submit packages.

When adding a new package to a repo, we should support placing these packages in a branch other than "main", such as "proposed".

It should be possible to specify additional keys & repos for sbuild to use across all builds, repo-wide.

Why

This is what Canonical is doing with their APT repositories.

How

Simply create symbolic links for all the generated files, with the links given the name of the file's SHA256 sum.

It should be possible to:

• Specify the base URL of a repo
• Specify the suite to pull from
• Fetch packages from the packages list(s) for that suite

The implementation belongs in apt-fetcher.

Debian versions require either the timestamp or revision count to be included in the version in order for packages to be properly incremented when building git updates. Timestamps can be fetched with git show -s --format=%ct, and revision count with git rev-list --count --first-parent HEAD.

To better support importing software which has already been packaged for Debian.

• Support fetching dsc files remotely with dget
• Support building from locally-stored dsc / tar files
• Support applying additional quilt patches

• Provide a GitHub / GitLab repo, or a list of individual repos
• Provide a destination repo which we can compare against / submit to
• Fetch each repo and their branches to the "CPI" system
• Watch for new branches, and updated branches
• Generate a list of repos that need to be built
• Generate packages, and submit packages

Useful for correcting errors from upstream proprietary packaging.

A migrate subcommand should be added so that packages can be moved between branches on the same suite. This would make it possible to migrate packages from a proposed branch to the main branch after they've been tested, for example.

A possible idea: mmstick/cargo-deb#71

Why

To get applications to appear within software centers that only support displaying packages with AppStream data.

How

This will require that we scrape deb packages for their .desktop files, possible appstream XML files, and icons. The icons can be re-rendered at various sizes and compressed into archives, while the appstream XML and .desktop files must be converted into DEP-11 Yaml and compressed into archives.