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> Debian explicitly rejected this philosophy in favour of one where OS maintainers are responsible for packaging all applications That assertion is quite wrong

> Debian explicitly rejected this philosophy in favour of one where OS maintainers are responsible for packaging all applications That assertion is quite wrong. Just because the OS has its official package repository, and just because OS maintainers volunteer their time to package some software projects, obviously that does not mean that maintainers are responsible for anything. You are confusing offering a convenience service with being responsible for packaging each and every software under the sun. In fact, your baseless assertion ignores two basic facts: packages are proposed and adopted by volunteers, thus what you've described as "OS maintainers" is pretty much any random person who simply wants a software to be available for download in the distro's official repositories, and packaging systems such as Debian's apt supports private package repositories, where anyone can make available their packages to the world. Another fact that you missed is that build systems such as Maven or msbuild or cmake or Gradle or whatever do support download packages only for a reason: convenience. It has absolutely nothing to do with where lies the responsibility of providing packages. It's convenient that a build fulfills all build dependencies. However, the responsibility of packaging and distributing packages of a software product lies exactly where it always was: those working on the software product.

lmm 7y ago
> packages are proposed and adopted by volunteers, thus what you've described as "OS maintainers" is pretty much any random person who simply wants a software to be available for download in the distro's official repositories The entirety of the Debian project are volunteers, random people who simply wanted xyz. And Debian's raison d'etre is as a "distribution" of existing software. More to the point, Debian packagers explicitly overrule "upstream" application developers; see the history of cdrecord or the ssh key generation bug for particularly spectacular examples. How can you say it's the responsibility of those working on the software project when they don't get to make the final decisions? > packaging systems such as Debian's apt supports private package repositories, where anyone can make available their packages to the world. Not really, because apt's approach to dependencies requires a central naming authority. In practice any private repository is necessarily a dead end: you can package additional software that depends on software from the central system, but not vice versa.

lmm 7y ago

> packages are proposed and adopted by volunteers, thus what you've described as "OS maintainers" is pretty much any random person who simply wants a software to be available for download in the distro's official repositories The entirety of the Debian project are volunteers, random people who simply wanted xyz. And Debian's raison d'etre is as a "distribution" of existing software. More to the point, Debian packagers explicitly overrule "upstream" application developers; see the history of cdrecord or the ssh key generation bug for particularly spectacular examples. How can you say it's the responsibility of those working on the software project when they don't get to make the final decisions? > packaging systems such as Debian's apt supports private package repositories, where anyone can make available their packages to the world. Not really, because apt's approach to dependencies requires a central naming authority. In practice any private repository is necessarily a dead end: you can package additional software that depends on software from the central system, but not vice versa.