Re: About language specific package management tools
One huge advantage of teaching our package management tools to
understand alternate package technologies and convert on the fly is that
we can use the mirror networks of the language-specific packages.
Unfortunately, we're fairly picky about licensing issues and legal
distributability of packages. That's a significant value we add to
Debian and it's really important. However, we'll probably find that if
we tried to automate something we'd discover legal problems. We'd
discover confirming DFSG status difficult if we tried and that there are
probably packages out there our users want that really when you look at
it aren't actually even redistributable.
It's great that we add the value we do but we should not force that on
our users. If our users are happy with CPAN or pip or whatever, we
should give them access to all that software even if we cannot host it
on our servers.
For that and a couple of other reasons I favor having each user machine
do the conversion rather than handling it centrally.
Providing ways to do caching at an organization level and ways to
package software that is important enough to bring into Debian both seem
important to me.
--Sam
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