R P Herrold wrote: > 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 Quality is implied by the hefty QA process debian goes through, and the long release cycles. I thought I had communicated that in the previous message. The last two major releases took almost 2 years of work each. Similar to the QA that Red Hat does, which is why their base packages are solid and well tested. This same level of QA of course doesn't apply to 3rd party repos. > 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). The users will have to make do with what there is. The same is true for CentOS/RHEL on my systems. I can't remember the last time I went to CPAN. I did maintain a couple dozen ruby on rails packages at my last company for the systems there, everything built by hand, it wasn't easy, or fun. nate