Unable to install package on Debian

[gbouthenot]

Hello.
I am struggling to install ngdevkit on debian 13 (Trixie)

Your Readme says:

If you are running an Ubuntu or Debian distribution, you can install pre-built debian packages from the ngdevkit PPA, as well as a couple of dependencies for the examples ROMs:

But it does not work.

add-apt-repository -y ppa:dciabrin/ngdevkit

But add-apt-repository does not exist.
The Debian package software-properties-common used to provide it, but it no longer exists.

Please consider building a Debian Package, Debian major version change only every 2 years.

[dciabrin]

For reference, the original reason I didn't provide Debian packages was twofold:

• I didn't have a repository to store .deb and provide the repository metadata.
• I didn't want to deal with signing the built packages for nightly builds, because that meant I'd have to manage crypto. Ubuntu's Launchpad and Fedora's Copr do that for me, which is really convenient.

I know this is less than ideal, but let me check if the current Ubuntu package play nice with Debian's dependencies, this might be a middle ground until I get a better idea of how to provide signed packages.

[dciabrin]

Ok this one is a bit more challenging that I was hoping, but what isn't..

We're lucky that ngdevkit has dependencies which are fairly similar between Ubuntu and Debian, so I could make the nightly packages built for Noble install and work on Trixie...

However: there's currently an important shortcoming, in that the packages are signed by the Launchpad builders with SHA-1, and that is not good for Trixie. This is common to all Launchpad nightly packages, and the Launchpad folks are currently looking into it [1].

So until the issue is resolved, your only option to install nightly packages is to allow SHA-1 signed packages, by raising the cutoff date in /usr/share/apt/default-sequoia.config, for example:

[hash_algorithms]
sha1.second_preimage_resistance = 2026-07-01    # Extend the expiry for legacy repositories

Once you have done that, you can install the ngdevkit source list without add-apt-repository as follows:

curl -fsSL 'https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x31B8B6160C6BAA4A' | gpg --dearmor > /usr/share/keyrings/ngdevkit.gpg
echo 'deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/ngdevkit.gpg] https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/dciabrin/ngdevkit/ubuntu/ noble main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ngdevkit.list
apt update
apt install ngdevkit ngdevkit-gngeo

I could build the examples more or less like what is written in the doc right for Ubuntu:

apt install build-essential pkgconf rsync autoconf sox libsox-fmt-mp3 imagemagick zip
git clone https://github.com/dciabrin/ngdevkit-examples
cd ngdevkit-examples
autoreconf -I. -iv
./configure
make

Let's wait for the Launchpad situation to settle, once they have updated their signing mechanism I'll update the doc for Debian users.

I'll see what I can do to provide native Debian packages once ngdevkit becomes stable enough and I'll switch to regular versionned releases instead of nightly builds only.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/2138981