amacater

People - you forget that the Debian community is not just random packagers but also developers. Debian packagers try VERY hard indeed to produce a stable system that works out of the box for all of their users - and that includes developers of all sorts with all types of development environment for several common programming languages.

As part of that, it's useful to know what's stable and what isn't. Debian tends to track version numbers and look for stable versions for a reason - once released, Debian commits to supporting a release for the lifetime of that release plus one year - roughly three years now. Anything that isn't actually released as stable and thereby fixed will go into testing/unstable - there's nothing to stop you running the latest and greatest at any time, but possibly not on Debian stable.

In another life, I have to deal with developers who say to me: just mirror Ruby and Rails for us on the inside of the corporate firewall. There isn't an easy place to start - if you want to build a Ruby infrastructure inside a large company, with software management systems, management suspicion of FLOSS but committed developers - where do you begin to convince people that this is a usable infrastructure?

Red Hat support a subset of very common packages and will support these now for up to 10 years. That's your banks, stock exchanges, infrastructure companies: if you want Ruby developers and programmers to make inroads into that sort of environment, then you need sane packaging sense or at least a sense of what's usable.

Debian produces a far larger subset for use of the programs out there - and on 13 hardware architectures.

As regards the English/Japanese language flaming: Debian has 1000 or so developers and maintainers, spread worldwide - Lucas is a French speaker, originally, but Debian developers speak and use most common human languages - English is a convenience to a truly distributed, international community.