[Pkg-julia-devel] Welcome to the Debian Julia Team!

[Sébastien Villemot]

Elliot Saba <staticfloat at gmail.com> writes:

> If I may ask, why is it desireable to have the debian team package julia
> packages?  Most of my "packaging experience" comes from the Homebrew project,
> where they explicitly don't package things that are available in their own
> package manager (Python's pip, Perl's CPAN, etc....).

On Debian it's the contrary: you get all the components of the operating
system and large parts of Python's PIP, Perl's CPAN, R's CPAN, Octave
Forge,… through the package manager.

I can give the following reasons for doing the same for Julia packages:

- uniformity of experience: a Debian user expects to get all its
  software through the Debian package manager (APT). Having to learn
  various package managers (Python's, Ruby's, Perl's, Octave's, R's,
  Emacs', Julia's…) seems redundant and a waste of time

- getting dependencies easily: if a Julia package relies on some shared
  library, then installing it through APT would automatically pull the
  library; Julia's package manager obviously cannot do that

- quality assurance and security: a Debian user typically trusts Debian
  Developpers to make various checks on the quality and security of a
  package before putting it in the Debian archive, so he will be more
  confident on the quality of a package that he gets through APT than
  through another mean; also, downloads from the Debian archive are
  GPG-signed, which gives the user more confidence into the fact the he
  downloaded an untampered piece of code

- scalability: the Debian package manager makes it much easier to deploy
  large installations with either many users on a single machine or many
  similar machines (like in large educational centers or scientific
  organizations). The sysadmin will clearly prefer to install an extra
  Debian package (since this already fits into its workflow) than to
  install Julia packages in the home of every user. Duplicating
  installations of Julia packages is also a waste of storage space, and
  creates a greater potential for heterogeneous installs

-- 
 .''`.    Sébastien Villemot
: :' :    Debian Developer
`. `'     http://www.dynare.org/sebastien
  `-      GPG Key: 4096R/381A7594
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