On 18 September 2013 08:41, Piotr Ożarowski <piotr@debian.org> wrote:
so instead of reinventing the wheel and trying to make something that
works everywhere they should make it easier for others to convert
whatever they provide (tarballs?) into .rpm, .deb or .exe.
From a developer point of view: this leaves you dependent on other people to get the latest release of your software to users, which can be very frustrating. For instance, I'm a developer for IPython: we made a 1.0 release over a month ago, and there's already been a 1.1 release since then, but Debian unstable still doesn't have either of these. This is not to criticise our packager, who we have a good relationship with, but simply to point out that this system is beyond our control. If we recommend that people use apt/yum/port/whatever to install IPython, they'll get an old package, with bugs that we've already fixed. By contrast, we update the packages on PyPI at release time, so users installing with pip will always get the current version.