I don't believe Debian ever managed to deal with 3rd party package management tools well. E.g. XEmacs has its own package management and apt-get equivalent, an

I don't believe Debian ever managed to deal with 3rd party package management tools well. E.g. XEmacs has its own package management and apt-get equivalent, and it never worked right in Debian. It's fundamentally hard problem to support different 3rd party release cycles while fulfilling traditional Debian goals of stability and correctness. Having said that the situation is particularly poor in Debian ruby gem land. There are 2 kinds of people -- the ones that understand Unix dynamic library versioning scheme and the ones that do not; the one that understand while non-distribution software needs to go into /usr/local and the ones that don't; the one that understand why Debian needs all the complexity in dependency management and the ones that don't; the ones that understand Unix rule of silence and the ones that don't, etc. Debian and Ruby communities are on the opposite side of this divide.