> control and lockin.

That's a pretty absurd claim. Is there anything to back it up?

I mean, releasing an open source operating system doesn't seem to be the epitome of "control and lock in" to me. Ubuntu probably wouldn't exist if Debian were any good at "control and lock in", for one.

Also, your "bug report" is quite different than the one Zed points out. You're suggesting a fundamental change to the way rubygems works on Debian. That's something that merits further discussion, rather than a simple "bug report", obviously.

Excuse me, but I tried to direct you back to the original premise. Now it's an absurd claim? Did you read the article? It's not even my claim. And yes, if you read http://twitter.com/zedshaw you will see that the bug I posted is one that Zed references.

By the way, your "post" is quite the "epitome" of total "air quotery".

Yes, that "It's simply a tactic to make sure that you are stuck on Debian." was, and is, an absurd claim without a shred of support.

He also says that "it is sadly pure business and has nothing to do with open source, quality, or culture." which is pretty odd, given that Debian is a non-profit, voluntary organization.

I don't think it's anything to do with control and lockin, it's to do with the fact that Debian feel they have a far superior package management system and allowing other, inferior (from their perspective) systems is a Bad Idea which they'll fight tooth and nail every step of the way.

It does seem silly from a rubyist's perspective but their approach does make a heck of a lot of complicated software work together in a way that makes administering complex server setups a doddle compared to how it could be.

There's just a yawning philosophical gap between how the Debian and Ruby communities look at the world and approach software management.

s/Ruby/Ruby, Perl, Java, Python

If everyone thinks you're off in the wilderness, you might want to check yourself, maybe just a bit.

1. Perl isn't nearly as broken on Debian as Ruby is. Don't know about the others.

2. These packaging systems were all designed by and for developers. Debian was designed by and for system administrators. The fact that there are common problems is not surpising.

Fair enough re: #2. Given that, it's not at all surprising that the ruby and python folk have done rvm and pip (which, in a faux-spectrum, is a big shift towards what maven et al. provide in the java world).

Of course, it's the debian maintainers' prerogative to structure things such that others generally pick up their toys and go play in their own sandboxes. I just get irritated when I hear people griping about it when it happens, as if system-level package managers have some kind of inherent priority.

I'll bite:

I'd say that it's more that if there's no (current) way to track what the other package management system is doing on the distro (any distro, not just Debian) then they can't tell what packages are installed and hence whether the distro-supplied packages can work with them...