Hello, I think your dispute goes down to the question if Debian's community infrastructure should preferably using software packaged for Debian (which salsa is doing) with the binaries Debian offers (which salsa is not doing). I find this interesting. The two positions are
A) No idea why this should be of concern. B) Using our own packages ensures that there is no diversion between what Debian ships and what Debian uses, so it can be bootstrapped on an island (which is the link to the DFSG) as a whole, not only the software it distributes. There is certainly more, like if B) was the case then the salsa maintainers would find problems with the packages/updates of the same and the Debian packages would be more likely be use by others when a big installation like salsa uses them. And that would strengthen Debian as a whole. However, this extra work /uncertainties may be something that overloaded maintainers want to avoid. I personally see the beauty of B. But if I cannot access the repository because of some downtime -no good. So I am also a fan of A - it works. The way to go may be to somehow convince the salsa maintainers that they will save some work when they adopt the Debian packages. And that whatever update they are doing is of no risk. No exact idea how to get there. But the notion of interchangeable Docker images sounds very reasonable ... and we work on exchanging them for singularity (syslabs.io) images later. Steffen
