Rant

A huge amount of software that is high quality with it's dependencies mapped out and so on and so forth will never, ever, be packaged by Debian. It's just not. It's not a issue of quality. It's a issue of time and man power.

As the FLOSS ecosystem increases in size it also increases in complexity and it also increases in speed. Both in terms of rate that software is written, but also in the rate of innovation. Now with dependencies it's not a issue of what makes software work within a OS, but what makes it worth within a organization or within a entire ecosystem.

Debian must operate under it's own time tables and follow it's own rules and unfortunately those time tables and rules rarely match up with anybody else's. With distribution's the software versions you can use is tied to the timetable set by that distribution's release strategy. A lot of the time it doesn't matter exactly what version of software you are using... Emacs latest release works about as well as a release from 2 years ago or 6 months ago. Same thing with compilers and terminals and whatnot.

But the same is not true for, say... Docker, kubespray, helm, vault, ansible, and cfssl. With tools like 'asdf' package manager (github.com/asdf-vm/asdf) I can install multiple versions of go, python, Erlang, and a half dozen other languages and their own language-specific package management systems and package versions.

I can use pipenv to setup different kinds of dependencies in a project, for example. I can setup dependency list for people who want to just run the software, but then I can setup a dependency list of pip packages for when you want to participate in the development process and their versions... and the versions of software needed to work with the CI pipeline or whatever.

And, sure, it's a mess and terrible and probably has lots of security deficiencies. But none of these things are tied specifically to your OS and your OS release versions like distribution packages are. And it works in pretty much any Linux distribution you want. And it works in OS X and most it mostly works in Windows. And the problems people are trying to address with these tools are unlikely to be addressed by any distribution-specific tool.

So not only you get the benefit of everybody using the software in any Linux distribution you also get the benefit of everybody using it in OS X and other operating systems. As these sort of tools gain in popularity the growth in change and innovation becomes almost exponential.

And while I see absolutely zero evidence to suggest that distributions and distribution packages are going away. (nor do I want them to go away... )What I do see is that distribution package management systems are increasingly relegated to simply setting up a base OS while other tools are used to manage most of the important software (from a perspective as a end user/developer/service provider) separate-but-on-top-of Linux distributions.