I agree with you. The pain occurs when this breaks down. Take Vagrant, for example. Brilliant tool. Depends on gems that weren't distro packaged for years. Thi

I agree with you. The pain occurs when this breaks down. Take Vagrant, for example. Brilliant tool. Depends on gems that weren't distro packaged for years. This made Vagrant unusable for anyone not deploying a ruby-based application stack, unless sysadmins accepted that they were going to have to deal with the extra work associated with multiple vendors and update mechanisms for each language on the system. So those of us using other stacks could use Vagrant, but only if we adopted Ruby's app-level packaging system. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059964 as an example of life being made difficult for distro packagers by the Ruby community. Since Rubyists tend to insist that distro packages are bad, so this is how it tends to stay. Thankfully the packaging of Vagrant and dependencies has now happened (finally; after years), and I can "apt-get install vagrant" now. But I hope this illustrates the problem. In the common use case, there is a dichotomy between distro and app-level dependencies, packaging and development. But in the grand scheme of things we all want to share our work across communities, and this dichotomy is a barrier to this ideal. Dependencies don't just go in one direction with language module repositories like pypi and rubygems at the top. Sometimes we want parts of the system to depend on them, too.