Is gdebi still necessary?

All of this *waves hands wildly* was a lot more fun when it was just some grad students and an assistant professor hacking on it for fun, and not something multi-billion dollar corporations depended on running with nine-nines uptime. Somehow, somewhere along the way, Berkeley became IBM.

> "well maintained" is an euphemism for "make sure someone else is paying for all of the maintenance work"

"Someone": yes. "Someone else": no, not necessarily. Maybe, maybe not. It depends. There's zero rule about that. That's besides the point.

If it's a very small (but still useful) dependency, that maintenance may not even require much money at all.

The purpose of these corporate policies is to avoid https://xkcd.com/2347/ and similar, difficult situations. How it is achieved matters but it is _secondary_. If "someone else" is very rich $BIGCORP2 that has tight control over the entire project, a bad open-source track record and is generally very difficult to work with (patent troll, painful license, other) then the answer could be "well maintained by someone else paying for all the work but... no thanks, too risky anyway". Unusual example but you get the idea.

BTW here's the best, non-comical version of XKCD 2347 I ever found: https://cacm.acm.org/practice/surviving-software-dependen...
It's pretty good; nice and short.

https://medium.com/@sdboyer/so-you-want-to-write-a-packag... is also nice. Much longer and much more technical.

Maybe your comment was tongue-in-cheek but it was interesting anyway. Every joke has a grain of truth, it's less funny otherwise :-)