The goal is to make my life easier when the same package may go to different distributions. This is not useful per se, but it becomes so when you use custom distributions names to distinguish separate product branches. Let's assume you have an application app , which has different flavours, for example alpha and beta . You may want to have two separate debian repos for app , one called alpha and one called beta . Hosts within environment A may refer to the alpha repo, while hosts in another environment, let's say environment B, may want to refer to the beta repo. This keeps the small or big differences in app isolated. Now, assume app reaches a point when the only difference between A and B is the distribution name, so you can have the same version for the alpha and beta repo: how can you avoid building the package twice? Is there a way to make both repos happy? These are the questions that led me to the need of having a local debian repo , to experiment a little on this to...