I’ve come up with a new reprepro wrapper for adding rebuilds of existing Debian packages to a local repository: reprepro-rebuilder. It should make it quicker to update local rebuilds of existing packages, patched or unpatched, working wholly out of git. Here’s how it works:

1. Start with a git branch corresponding to the existing Debian package you want to rebuild. Probably you want dgit clone foo.

2. Say reprepro-rebuilder unstable, and the script will switch you to a branch PREFIX/unstable, where PREFIX is a short name for your reprepro repository, and update debian/changelog for a local rebuild. If the branch already exists, it will be updated with a merge.

3. You can now do any local patching you might require. Then, say reprepro-rebuilder --release. (The command from step (2) will offer to release immediately for the case that no additional patching is required.)

4. At this point, your reprepro will contain a source package coresponding to your local rebuild. You can say reprepro-rebuilder --wanna-build to build any missing binaries for all suites, for localhost’s Debian architecture. (Again, the command from step (3) will offer to do this immediately after adding the source package.)

Additionally, if you’re rebuilding for unstable, reprepro-rebuilder will offer to rebuild for backports, too, and there are a few more convenience features, such as offering to build binaries for testing between steps (2) and (3). You can leave the script waiting to release while you do the testing.

I think that the main value of this script is keeping track of the distinct steps of a relatively fiddly, potentially slow-running workflow for you, including offering to perform your likely next step immediately. This means that you can be doing something else while the rebuilds are trundling along: you just start reprepro-rebuilder unstable in a shell, and unless additional patching is required between steps (2) and (3), you just have to answer script prompts as they show up and everything gets done.

If you need to merge from upstream fairly regularly, and then produce binary packages for both unstable and backports, that’s quite a lot of manual steps that reprepro-rebuilder takes care of for you. But the script’s command line interface is flexible enough for the cases where more intervention is required, too. For example, for my Emacs snapshot builds, I have another script to replace steps (1) and (2), which merges from a specific branch that I know has been manually tested, and generates a special version number. Then I say reprepro-rebuilder --release and the script takes care of preparing packages for unstable and bullseye-backports, and I can have my snapshots on all of my machines without a lot of work.