songbird wrote: > Keith Christian wrote: > > Are there any methods to create Debian packages for these (and > > similar) package tools (and the files they install) so that Debian's > > native packaging system has "inventory control" everything? > > > > I realize that software has been installed outside of APT's purview > > since the beginnings of Debian, but I wonder if there is any effort to > > corral these other packaging systems so APT can be the tool of choice > > for all package management. > > no, and i sure hope not! do you know how many packages > are in those? > > PyPI is a few hundred thousand items. CPAN i don't know > know, same with ruby or go. > > if you're doing that then you might as well toss github, > gitlab and salsa in there too. > > i repeat myself please don't! > > should be going the other way instead. and i mean by that > that Debian is duplicating efforts that could be better spent > on other things instead. once a language or system is set up > to figure out it's own dependencies why duplicate that effort? > > the more that is removed from the dependency chain is an > improvement for future freezes and getting transitions done > faster.
There are good reasons for doing this on a local basis. For example, let's say you have an organization that develops a software service and sells access to it. When an engineer asks for a particular library, it turns out to be a really good idea to immediately turn it into a Debian package so that you can keep the same version all the way through the chain to production. Many of the language-specific tools have a tendency to automatically acquire the latest version of a library or module every time they are invoked, or to spit errors if they can't pull down the version that they were asked to get. That's rather troublesome. Having a local apt repository with all the versions of a library that you've actually used, so you can re-deploy an old one exactly the way it was or install a fixed version across a set of machines is very, very useful. As long as the tools exist to take a language's libraries/modules/packages and turn them into a Debian package exist, all the rest of the infrastructure is already in place. There's no real need to try to pre-package all of CPAN, CRAN, CTAN, Ruby Gems, pypi... -dsr-
