Hi Steffen, Thanks for moving the thread out. Please allow me to repeat some of my points here:
On 2019-07-11 10:53, Steffen Möller wrote: > On an project-internal mailing list the thread "Conda vs Debian" > evolved. Sam kindly reminded us to discuss this publicly. So, here you > go, issues raised were > > * interaction with industry-standard non-free software > > + Intel compilers and libraries > > + NVidia drivers and libraries To some extent this overlaps with some of the "difficulties in deep learning framework packaging". Many serious users need the performance improvement brought by the non-free blobs, but we Debian always have trouble dealing with these blobs. We don't have control over them, we became passive once something goes wrong with them. So my personal opinion is not to touch these legally problematic stuff anymore. We do keep providing a solid base system to the world, on top of which business groups can do whatever they want with non-free blobs. If some software upstream doesn't have the intention to be well integrated into distributions, why do we bother packaging them? Why not just leave the work to the business groups such as conda. Apart from the non-free & performance stuff, as a conda user I still have some reasons to use conda instead of python packages provided by Debian: 1. conda doesn't require root permission. This helps non-privileged users alot. 2. conda's python environment management 3. conda is distribution-agnostic. I can retain the same python environment with conda across different machines with different systems. The question is, what can we do to improve Debian, if we see it appropriate?
