Applications and bundled libraries

Whilst I am a huge fan of 'the Debian way' of central package management, it really isn't true to say that the current (large) pile covers most areas. There are big gaps in no doubt many areas; I've recently noticed them in two: energy monitoring/control and building design. There are an awful lot of handy Windows apps for things like calculating beam loadings in buildings, and many more for specifying vendor's products like hot water tanks and ventilation equipment. Very few of those are free software, but they probably could be and either they all need adding to the distro repositories or we need a more modular mechanism for installing developer/vendor-supplied apps. I believe autopackage is intended to fill that role but it hasn't been very popular so far (possibly because the internals are pretty ugly). I mention it because no-one else has so far - maybe something like that is worth more effort.

On the energy monitoring front there are plenty of things like mango, diyzoning, owfs and temploggerd whcih are basic apps for this stuff but none are in Debian yet (or weren't last time I looked). No doubt they will be at some point but until then anyone wanting to use them has an installation problem. I tried local building but found this to be very hard indeed for the two java-based apps there when targeting an arm box. Obviously that wasn't something the developers had tried.

I do agree with those who say that developers should not be doing packaging and system integration. They are not well-placed to understand the issue of less-common architectures, complex system interactions and really have better things to be doing with their time.

I am inclined to agree that a bit more modularisation of distro repositories would be a good thing. Ubuntu's model of 'core stuff', 'common stuff' and 'everything else' is a step in this direction. Debian's monlithic tools are becoming stretched, especially on small systems (where the package management overhead can amount to 40% of the rootfs storage requirement). I'm not sure there are 'millions' of applications, but there are many tens of thousands and dealing with that efficiently is a challenge.

One other thing which I don't think has been said loudly enough in this debate is that users really do value stability. The central repository model does provide a lot more of that than the 'install random stuff off the net' model. It really is worth something, and whilst they also value being able to install 'latest' of a few apps there is a real potential tradeoff there which needs to be managed somehow. The users I deal with are _much_ more interested in having a stable system than they are in the latest and greatest. They only upgrade apps when they find they need to for some significant feature. Making that easy and reliable _and discoverable_ for them is where we have much room for improvement.

I find that the Debian backports model works pretty well for this, and could be greatly extended to provide a much larger chunk of the new stuff users want. However it is not a particularly discoverable mechanism - not helped at all by the way many users are used to the Windows model of 'just click here to install this stuff'. There is a significant element of user education to get them to stop and think for a mo and see if what they want is already in the packaging system, or would be if they/it added a suitable repo. Most software websites don't help at all with this, as they encourage the Windows model and rarely mention the 'distro' model.

So, it's a thorny issue, and I agree there is room for improvement, but I also feel that the good part of what we have is very valuable, to everybody, including naive users on laptops, even if they don't really appreciate it. Make it easier to go outside that model by all means, when necessary, but try hard not to just make thing unreliable and/or insecure as a result.