Swimming against the tide.

Well I wasn't trying to make out that Debian is godlike and they do no wrong. I am sure that
they are as guilty at it as anybody.

And the Slackware attitude to dependency tracking with software packages is pretty much
correct. It's a nice feature, but it's not the best way to solve many of the problems faced
with Linux software distribution.


> That's life. Building a derivative only saves you so much work. 

The ideal situation is the upstream developers package the software themselves and then
distributions collect them, test them, and then provide them to their end users.

That should be the ultimate goal for software distribution.. people package their own software
and it 'just works' on all distributions.

All the distributions that get released around the same time all use the same software.
Similar versions of OpenSSL, Xorg, Linux, GCC, etc etc. Having a dozen different people tweak
all these applications in dozen different ways is kinda silly seeing how little it actually
benefits end users. 

I mean, as a end user.. Is the GCC provided by Suse is going to be different enough and
provide compelling improvements compared to the version shipping with CentOS, Fedora, Debian,
Ubuntu, Slackware, etc etc? Is it possible justify the amount of duplicate work that all these
people put into building and packaging their own very-slightly-different versions when there
is so much other important work that these guys could get done by working together?

And if Suse did indeed have some dramatic improvement to their GCC version.. wouldn't it be
nice if Debian users could just copy it off of Suse's FTP server or installation cdroms and
use it? No worries? That the GCC developers could just suck down the patches and use them
without worrying how it may break something in Debian?

I like the idea of high quality binary distribution of open source software. But maybe there
are other ways.. rpm2git seem interesting.

Maybe it can be extended to support debs... I don't know. It could be a useful way to start
smoothing out the trivial differences (that pop up as stumbling blocks for users) between
distributions and lead to higher amounts of software compatibility.