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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/0000014b2698cba1-b2e5ca2f-3a3a-4d09-ad10-b2d2c1ca849f-000...@email.amazonses.com
