> This is short-sighted, and greatly influenced by the voices of language-specific
> upstream communities. As seen at several occasions at PyCon: Ask an upstream
> community, which Linux distribution they use (majority of hands go up for
> Ubuntu), and then how many of those use the system Python (majority of hands go
> down). Please ask this Python question to an upstream Java, upstream Ruby
> community, and I assume that nobody cares and uses the Python as distributed by
> Ubuntu. Ask the Java and Python communities the same question about Ruby, and
> these are probably happy with the Ruby found on Ubuntu. Now remove the Ruby,
> Python and Java stacks, and probably nobody will be happy anymore.
I agree strongly with this, and I think it's well-put. When I'm working
on (say) Launchpad, I'm acting as a Python developer, and I'm much more
likely to look to PyPI for dependencies than to look to the Ubuntu
archive. On the other hand, when I'm installing (say) icingaweb2 to
help me monitor systems on my local network, I'm *not* acting as a PHP
developer despite the fact that it happens to be implemented in PHP; I
just want to install something vaguely sensible and maintained and have
it work, rather than having to teach myself how PHP repositories work,
and having my distribution suddenly tell me that I have to do the latter
would be a considerable inconvenience.
In the case of Rails, perhaps most users of that package would be Ruby
developers anyway and thus would be perfectly happy to use Ruby-specific
repositories, although I don't know that for sure and you'd need to ask
people who actually use it. However, we should be very wary of
generalising from this case to cases of packages that can be used with
only minimal experience with their implementation language.
I would say that removing poorly-maintained packages that are mainly
used by people in developer roles is very different from removing
poorly-maintained packages that are mainly used by people in user roles.
(I've chosen my words carefully here to emphasise that the same people
may very well have different roles depending on what they're doing.)
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@ubuntu.com]
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