Tarsnap binary packages for Debian / Ubuntu / Mint / etc.

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

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Hi all,

Tarsnap now provides officially supported binary packages for Debian,
Ubuntu, Mint, and other "Debian-like" distributions, for the i386 and
amd64 architectures.  We're making these (and the source packages which
were announced last year) available via an apt repository, so it should
now be very easy for users of those distributions to install Tarsnap and
keep it updated.

For details on installing these, please see the Tarsnap website:
  https://www.tarsnap.com/pkg-deb.html

Binary packages have been one of the most frequent requests I've heard from
potential Tarsnap users, but since Tarsnap is a backup service *for truly
paranoid* users, providing binaries (which are inherently hard to audit)
has been a challenge from a security perspective.  However, I believe that
our build process -- on a system which has never been internet-connected,
with encrypted disks, which is only turned on when needed for builds -- is
sufficient to minimize the risk of subverted binaries being distributed.
That said, even a minimal risk is worse than no risk; I still encourage the
most security-conscious users to audit the source code and compile it
themselves.

As part of updating the Tarsnap website with instructions on using these
deb packages, we've also expanded the "download" page to provide more
specific details about different operating systems, including pointing to
ports maintained by those platforms:
  https://www.tarsnap.com/download.html

We hope to provide binary packages for other platforms in the coming months
- -- probably Redhat-based distributions (Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, etc.) first,
and then OS X, but this will depend on both demand and the complexity of
building packages for different platforms.

- -- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid
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