[ILUG] ogg-vorbis...

[Rick Moen]

begin Stephen Shirley quotation:

> Well that's not really accurate. The problem with rpm's is that the vast
> majority are not packaged by redhat, they're rolled by helpful people etc.
> Debian on the other hand has a veritable army of people who have packaged
> just about everything on the planetaccording to their guidlines. To
> clarify that, the people who make .debs tend to work for debian (ok maybe
> not "work" in the traditional sense but you get the point), whereas the
> people who make .rpms don't work for anyone.

Fortunately for the .deb-using crowd, even "unofficial" deb packages
_tend_ to be tested prior to public offering using Sean Perry's
well-maintained "Lintian" utility (http://lintian.debian.org/), which, 
as the user's manual says, "checks packages and reports possible policy
violations".

Of course, there's no guarantee that an "unofficial" package's maintainer 
will use Lintian (or heed Debian Policy) -- thus the "important warning" at 
the top of http://www.internatif.org/bortzmeyer/debian/apt-sources/ -  but 
at least that Policy and tool exist, and tradition among Debian
maintainers favours their use.

Other than that, your point is well taken.  When last I checked, the
Debian-stable branch contained something like over 6000 packages
(including all four collections -- main, non-free, contrib[1], and
non-US).

[1] The "contrib" collection isn't what most people assume it to be:
It's the repository for free / open-source licensed packages that depend
upon at least one separate proprietary package.  The collection is
poorly named, but thinking of a better (concise) name for that concept 
has turned out to be non-trivial.

-- 
Cheers,                                      Right to keep and bear
Rick Moen                                  Haiku shall not be abridged
rick at linuxmafia.com                           Or denied.  So there.