Check out my above comment and feel free to ping me via email or twitter. Would love to get more detailed feedback from you and maybe try to change your mind!
Just for fun: man reprepro and search for 'corrupt' :)
You can use all your normal tools to upgrade, install, and remove packages as you normally would. So, for, Debian-based systems, apt-get upgrade, install, remove, etc all work as you expect.
We provide SSL, gpg, and fine-grained access control all out of the box. Fine-grained access control doesn't really exist with reprepro or createrepo or other tools and you'd have to build it yourself.
Also, you don't need to worry about backups, the numerous bugs in all the repo creation tools, and we have chef and puppet modules to help deploy this across your infrastructure.
We have support for multiple linux distributions in a single repo (quite a pain to deal with yourself) and best of all we also support pushing multiple versions of a single package to a repo -- something that reprepro does not support, but has been in progress for ~4 years [1].
I thought it was pretty crazy that a tweak to prevent XFree86 from breaking on 64bit systems + support for the ELF small code execution model would later result in pthread_create overhead so large that creating threads on a P4 would be as slow as creating threads on a 386.
you just strip the debug symbols out (and put them somewhere safe). then write a .gnu_debuglink section to the stripped ELF binary with a CRC that matches the stripped symbols.
once something bad happens: you just take the core dump, the symbols you have tucked away, and you are able to debug just fine.
The question really is: how much data corruption is occurring that _does not_ cause world ending segfaults? THAT is what you need to worry about. Check yourself before you wreck yourself.
registers are scanned, too. the bug is not that the ref is in a register. the bug is that there are no refs anywhere. not on the stack and not in any register.
testing harness, scripts to build it, and to run it: http://gist.github.com/483524 -- yes i was too lazy to make a makefile.
you will still need to construct some command line fu to separate the results into separate files so you can load it into whatever maths program you want.