Debian ships with a lot of packages. This allows our users to easily install software without too much effort -- just run apt-get install foo, and foo gets installed.

However, Debian does not ship with everything, and for that reason there sometimes are things that are not installable with just the Debian repositories. Examples include:

• Software that is not (yet) packaged for Debian
• A repository for software that is in Debian, but for the bleeding-edge version of that software (e.g., maintained by upstream, or maintained by the Debian packager for that software)
• Software that is not DFSG-free, and cannot be included into Debian's non-free repository due to licensing issues, but that can freely be installed by Debian users.

In order to enable and use such repositories on a Debian system, a user currently has to perform some actions that may be insecure:

• Some repositories provide a link to a repository and a key, and expect the user to perform all actions to enable that repository manually. This works, but mistakes are easy to make (especially for beginners), and therefore it is not ideal.
• Some repositories provide a script to enable the repository, which must be run as root. Such scripts are not signed when run. In other words, we expect users to run untrusted code downloaded from the Internet, when everywhere else we tell people that doing so is a bad idea.
• Some repositories provide a single .deb file that can be installed, and which enables the necessary repositories in the apt configuration. Since, in contrast to RPM files, Debian packages are not signed, this means that the configuration is not enabled securely.

While there is a tool to enable package signatures in Debian packages, the dpkg tool does not enforce the existence of such signatures, and therefore it is possible for an attacker to replace the (signed) .deb file with an unsigned variant, bypassing the whole signature.

In an effort to remedy this whole situation, I looked at creating extrepo, a package that would download repository metadata from a special-purpose repository, verify the signatures placed on that metadata, and if everything matches, enable the repository by creating the necessary apt configuration files.

This should allow users to enable external repository "foo" by running extrepo enable foo, rather than downloading a script from foo's website and executing it as root -- or other similarly insecure options.

The extrepo package has been uploaded to Debian; and so once NEW processing has finished, will be available in Debian unstable.

I might upload it to backports too if no issues are found, but that won't be an immediate thing.