On Wed, 29 Apr 2009, nate wrote:
It's more about the repositories themselves, the QA behind them, the integration of packages. A single unified source for patches, security fixes etc.
From Debian 5.0 (lenny):
Total package names: 29647 (1186k) Normal packages: 22400 Pure virtual packages: 319 Single virtual packages: 2154 Mixed virtual packages: 209 Missing: 4565
oh please -- move advocacy to a new thread raher than hijacking. Quantity does not imply quality, and AWOL maintainers who move on is a problem in all of FOSS
No need to go to 3rd party repositories, no need to worry about overrides, worrying about a 3rd party repo overwriting another package on the system, very wide selection of well tested packages (and yes I stick to Debian stable, haven't needed to run 'testing' since about 2002).
and so R-2.9.0 is not available to you, and if your users wanted R-xts, to extend zoo [which extends R], the only place for those packages in Debian packaging are r-forge and CRAN (as they are not in any 'official' Debian archive, and only in the independents).
-- Russ herrold