[jdamato]

Hi:

I built packagecloud, which is what GitLab uses for hosting packages.

Getting a package repository installed securely is quite a bit more difficult than it seems, but I agree that our Manual install instructions should be simplified and improved. I'll see what I can do about making them better.

As far as the hostname goes: we used it simply because its a unique identifier for the machine, but really anything could be used (like a MAC address or whatever). This is used because private repositories have tokens issued against a unique identifier, so a machine reinstalling a repo won't generate a new read token. I'll add a comment to the bash script explaining this, and consider adding an override in the future so that users can specify another identifier of their choice instead.

This is why a request to the server is required: it generates a read token server side which is then implanted into the APT repository configuration for the local machine so that the local machine can access the repo.