MEPIS Community Forum

1) should we put together and maintain such a list?

Dedicated Repositories
In addition to the general repositories such as Debian, Mepis, and Community, there also exist a certain number of dedicated repositories associated with a single application. When you add them to your sources.list file, either directly or through Synaptic, then you will receive update notifications. Here are some of the more common ones used in MEPIS, arranged as they would appear in sources.list:
LibreOffice: deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/gericom/libreoffice/ /
QGIS: deb http://qgis.org/debian/ squeeze main
VirtualBox: deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/ squeeze contrib
Google Earth: deb http://dl.google.com/linux/earth/deb/ stable main
Google Chrome: deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable non-free main
Google Talk Plugin: deb http://dl.google.com/linux/talkplugin/deb/ stable main
Opera: deb http://deb.opera.com/opera/ squeeze non-free
Opera and Google provide the GPG key with the installation, but you will have to acquire the others in the manner already described.

Subversion Repositories
One final category of repository exists for acquiring the most recent build of an application. This is done through Subversion (in the regular repos), a version control system that can be used by the end user to stay current with development. Once installed through the repos, you can use the application for any development line that offers a repository set up for the use of Subversion. Here is an example for the drawing application Inkscape:
svn co svn://svn.tuxfamily.org/svnroot/xmoto/s ... extensions
That command will check out a copy of the application source code into a directory named trunk on your local machine. Subversion is mostly used by developers working on a project, but sometimes endusers will use it for a particular interest.