I was unaware of Debian’s extrepo command…
…and its actually a pretty neat idea!
Now admittedly, I encountered extrepo when one of the repos being added to a Docker container build I care about was being unreliable, but that caused me to dig into what it is and how it works and I quite like the idea.
The basic idea is that there are people out there who publish packages for Debian, either as hilarious curl scripts which you’re meant to pipe into a root shell, or as just .deb files which you download and manually install. Instead of being terrible though, what if there was a tool which knew how to provide apt repository configurations for those things? Then, apt would do the right things when the packages changed and so forth. Those configurations could come from a central source which you could also trust to provide the GPG keys that signed those packages. Neat yeah?