If Debian made it a policy to change packages as little as possible (which is not "not at all"), these problems wouldn't show up.
Also, yes, your shiny PostgreSQL package now matches every other Debian package, but it is different from every non-Debian PostgreSQL install out there. Zed wasn't talking about lock-in for nothing.
No, but others would show up. Come on, these things are engineering tradeoffs, with both positive and negative aspects. Even where we disagree about the benefits and disadvantages, we should agree to disagree in a civil way, rather than calling for "in-person confrontations". There are certainly technical complaints to be made about Debian (I could make a long list myself), but Zed's attitude is way out of line.
- config files would be shoved all over the place, without being able to back up /etc as a config location or map frequently read data to var
- You couldn't partition your disks reaosnably beyond a single filesystem as there's no way to predict where apps will shove their junk
- Uninstalling apps would leave junk cron jobs and other files made manually rather than put into include dirs
- Your PATH would be exceedingly long
- You'd end up using 'find' a lot more to know where a particular library is.
I don't think you can consider that locked-in in the slightest--it's not like they changed the DB format or removed the ability to dump a db. Do you really think anyone is going to load up postgres on Fedora, find that it's installed in /var/postgres and not /var/lib/postgres, throw their hands in the air, scream like a girl and then go reinstall Debian? Having stuff moved around can be coped with. I'll be able to transfer the data itself to another disto just fine, thank you very much.
What is the alternative? Should software authors be given carte blanche control of their own packages, regardless of their knowledge and commitment to the Debian platform and ideals? The goal is to make a working system, not to indulge every author that thinks their package is the exception to the guidelines laid out by the Debian members.
I have to say, I just installed Debian's postgresql-9.0 package and I was pleasantly surprised. They've packaged things in such a way that you can install 9.0 and 8.4 in parallel. Yes, it is different than the default postgres install. Instead of everything being in one directory they put config files in /etc, library files in /usr/lib and your db in /var/lib--just like every other package on the system. This seems like the right kind of packaging to me--it makes the system consistent.
Of course, for every good package like postgres there's a package with some epically stupid decision (netcat-traditional's "-q" patch).