Dear lazyweb,

reprepro is a great tool. I hand it some configuration and a bunch of packages, and it creates the necessary directory structure, moves the packages to the right location, and generates a (signed) Debian package repository. Obviously it would be possible to all that reprepro does by hand—by calling things like cp and dpkg-scanpackages and gpg and other things by hand—but it's easy to forget a step when doing so, and having a tool that just does things for me is wonderful. The fact that it does so only on request (i.e., when I know something has changed, rather than "once every so often") is also quite useful.

At work, I currently need to maintain a bunch of package repositories. The Debian package archives there are maintained with reprepro, but I currently maintain the RPM archives pretty much by hand: create the correct directories, copy the right files to the right places, run createrepo over the correct directories (and in the case of the OpenSUSE repository, also run gpg), and a bunch of other things specific to our local installation. As if to prove my above point, apparently I forgot to do a few things there, meaning, some of the RPM repositories didn't actually work correctly, and my testing didn't catch on.

Which makes me wonder how RPM package repositories are usually maintained. When one needs to maintain just a bunch of packages for a number of servers, well, running createrepo manually isn't too much of a problem. When it gets beyond own systems, however, and when you need to support multiple builds for multiple versions of multiple distributions, having to maintain all those repositories by hand is probably not the best idea.

So, dear lazyweb: how do large RPM repositories maintain state of the packages, the distributions they belong to, and similar things?

Please don't say "custom scripts"