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Comment by jolan | Hacker News Reader

Your post boils down to something like "developers should ship Debian packages because I use Debian and all my favorite software packages are out of date or non-existent".

Maybe you should move away from a distro that freezes for 6 months to roll a stable release which won't get anything more than security/crash fixes for 2+ years.

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Many Debian developers agree: http://lwn.net/Articles/406301/ OTOH, it's nice to know that you can run in the same environment without changes for 2 years and not care about incompatible updates.

That wasn't my aim. In fact I'm not using Debian at the moment as I indicated, I just know the commands better to give examples. This isn't about a specific distro, it's about the huge benefits of system packages and their toolchains in general. I'm not even really concerned with official packages and the official blessed package repos.

I've created hundreds of packages for OpenBSD and you just seem pretty gullible about the whole process.

You can't just write about the packaging process and hope people come forward to volunteer to do the actual work. There's a large amount of thankless sweat equity when you provide packages. People whine when things are broken and rarely send praise when it just works as it should.

If you really want to change the world, start with creating a Ruby apt repository for Debian/Ubuntu/whatever you use that people can actually deploy in production.

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