Generating APT repo from a list of debs without changes files

[Dagang Wei <fu...@gmail.com>]

Hi folks,

I noticed Bigtop generates APT repo based on changes files [1] which in
turn are generated during deb build IIUC, but the changes files are not in
the output APT repo.

In my case, say package abc-1.2.3 was built one month ago, but now it is
broken for external dependencies, I want to reuse the existing
abc-1.2.3.deb to generate a new APT repo (with version upgrades for other
packages). I am wondering is it possible to generate APT repo just from a
list of debs without the changes files? This way, it will be much more
flexible, I can decide whether to fix a broken package or just reuse the
existing deb.

Thanks!

[1]: https://github.com/apache/bigtop/blob/master/packages.gradle#L760