supports all major distros: openSUSE, Fedora, Debian-based, even Arch.
Don't get me wrong but such tools should be vendor-independent unless it targets only the vendor-specific distribution and have a clear business model so it can operate profitable.
To Attachmate/Novell/SUSE: Make your software easier to install. Otherwise no one will use it. And you will have to do all the work, which makes me wonder why you bothered open sourcing it at all.
The goal is to support as many distributions as we can.
The site has promised nothing new that I can see.. Launchpad already offers what is currently being promised.
In addition, the launchpad build infra is well designed and provides an assured build that is using the same architecutrure as builds for Ubuntu's primary archive (including gpg and network isolated build hosts)
Launchpad also has a receipe based build process, that (I haven't tried) could surely tie into Github?
On the face of it, this seems like a fun project for the developers, but nothing new.
On the S3 side there is a Ruby gem that will send .deb's up to a bucket and put the right files in the right places.[1]
On the client side, apt-s3[2] provides the functionality for aptitude to download packages from S3 (Remember that S3 doesn't use normal HTTP basic so if you don't want your package public it needs to speak Amazon's language). A few people improved on this, and I have a straightforward fork and PPA built for this.[3]
I've been using all this in production for a few months and it has worked wonderfully. Jenkins builds the package and sends it up via deb-s3 and app servers have chef scripts that stop/start the daemon and update the package.
[1]https://github.com/krobertson/deb-s3
[2]https://github.com/kyleshank/apt-s3
[3]https://launchpad.net/~skye-book/+archive/apt-transport-s3
That said, I hate it. I can't stand the UI, it's not that it's "ugly" (which it is), but that it's really not functional. Things are just hard to find and others don't work the way I expect them to.
Plus, it has a lot of 'missing features' I now expect because of things like GitHub like tagging issues, naming Bugs as "Issues" because I like that everything (anything really) is reported like a todo list (not just 'bugs' in the regular meaning of the word) and other things.
Not an Ubuntu hater here, just someone that hates stale software.