Releases are built and packaged firstly for all currently supported versions of Almalinux (compatible with RHEL and other RHEL clones) and Debian. Ubuntu, Fedora, and SuseLES are built as well, but possibly with a small delay wrt. the platforms mentioned before.
An AUR package recipe for ArchLinux is maintained upstream (not by us, thanks fsiegert!): AUR (en) - cvmfs
There is an existing ITP (“intention to package”) bug in the Debian bug tracker. It looks like this effort stalled.
The way to go to get cvmfs packages into the official Debian repositories (and Ubuntu, Mint aso.) would be to pick up that effort and update it to the latest version.
Thanks for the link. There are a couple of small issues that I was planning to fix before contacting upstream repositories because they go against packaging guidelines and will trigger complaints. One is the addition of man pages, which I have written for 2.13. Then we can cleanup our vendored dependencies a bit more, and split out the debug symbols in a debug package. For the last one I still have to try out how to make that work without tempting our users to skip them, typically it’s very important for debugging to have stack traces in the logs on a crash .
cvmfs has a number of bundled libraries and I think that Debian package reviewers don’t like that so that would need to be worked through. I think also the fact that cvmfs packages require a separate cvmfs-config package is likely to cause problems.
Indeed, the vendored dependencies are likely going to be raised as an issue, but I don’t think it’s a blocker. We can reduce the number already quite a bit: there’s the switch to libnettle, and protobuf can also be safely used from the system, I think. There are some systems where packagers build cvmfs without most vendored dependencies, but I think I wouldn’t go that far.
I would be surprised if the cvmfs-config package is an issue. That can also be added to the repos, right?