Saw the post here regarding CentOS’s off-springs and a couple of people brought up the excellent point of: why play with fire? Let’s just stick to Debian.
The only disadvantage I currently see is the outdated packages, and I’m curious whether makedeb solves them. Does anyone here use it regularly? How stable and comfortable is it? Did you write your own PKGBUILDs?
I maintain a git repo of PKGBUILDs for use with makedeb. I use it to build binary packages for some programs which I like having newer versions (like neovim) and for some programs which I develop mostly for myself so they probably wouldn’t be accepted to official repos. I also host aptly repo with binary debs built this way.
To be sure that binary debs are “correct” (no broken dependencies, executables execute etc.), I created a program which runs makedeb in a Debian Docker container. It then sends build artifacts to aptly repo.
This workflow works flawlessly for me and I like it very much. I love the format of PKGBUILD files and I wish Debian modified its official tooling to support something else than the current official workflow.
Sometimes I have to rebuild some of the packages because there are breaking changes in Debian (e.g. new version of libc), but it isn’t a big deal thanks wrapper which can build all PKGBUILDs in my repo at once (although I may have to change packages versions so aptly accepts them).
I lint debs with lintian and there are some warnings introduced by makedeb, but most of them are easy to fix or workaround. Others are not important for me.
I don’t use MPR, because I don’t trust these scripts. I probably wouldn’t use makedeb to update some core programs or libraries (like Bash or systemd), but it’s great for non-core ones.
Also, I think that author of makedeb wanted to rewrite it in rust, possibly accepting breaking changes, but I don’t know what’s the status of this.