AptFs - FUSE filesystem for APT source repositories

(This was one of those pesky “oh, it’ll only take an hour” ideas.)

AptFs is a FUSE-based filesystem that provides a view to unpacked and patched Debian source packages as regular folders on a filesystem. Binary packages are modelled as symbolic links pointing to their respective source package.

This arrangement allows one to:

• Use standard UNIX utilities to perform queries across the entire Debian source tree
• Save keystrokes and time when downloading (and subsequently deleting) source packages
• Do really awesome things easily, like perform static analysis on the archive, count swear words, etc.

The program maintains a sliding window of unpacked packages to perform automatic cleanup of unpacked packages — it would not be very helpful if commands such as

% find /path/to/aptfs

…unpacked the entire archive into your temporary directory.

Source (GPLv3) is available in Git:

% git-clone git://git.chris-lamb.co.uk/aptfs  # or
% git-clone http://git.chris-lamb.co.uk/repo/aptfs.git

Patches always welcome, and shout if you like it; I’ll file an ITP and try and upload it.