Hi folks, The absense of a centralized, informal Debian package repository where trusted users could upload their own packaging scripts has been long-forgotten. As an inevitable result, many user packaging scripts exist in the wild, scattered like stars in the sky, with varied packaging quality. Their existence reflects our users' demand, especially the experienced ones', that has not been satisfied by the Debian archive. Such idea about informal packaging repository has been demonstrated successful by the Archlinux User Repository (AUR). Hence, it should be valuable to think about it for Debian.
Assume that Debian has an informal packaging repository similar to AUR, which distrbutes packaging scripts only and requires to be built locally. According to my observation and experience, such a repository: 1. Allows packaging in some compromised manner to exist, which means they dont fully comply with DFSG or Policy. This makes great sense for several kinds of packages: (1) Packages that are extremely hard to made compliant to Policy. For example, bazel the build system of TensorFlow and other Google products - No Debian Developer can make it meet the Policy's requirement without great sacrifice. The outcome doesn't worth the waste in time and energy. (2) Dirty but useful non-free blobs, such as nvidia's cuDNN (CUDA Deep Neural Network) library, which dominates the field of high performance neural network training and inference. I really hate reading NVIDIA's non-free legal texts, and in such repository we can avoid reading the license and just get the scutwork done and make users happy. (3) Data with obscure licensing. In this repository we can feel free to package pre-trained neural networks or training data without carefully examing the licensing. (4) Packages with dirty hacks, or targeted on testing the water. This makes sense for packages that doesn't worth the effort to make it fully compliant with Debian's quality requirement and some user just wants it. (5) Packages that utilizes SIMD instructions heavily. Such package is very easy to package in such repo. (So this Proposal actually suppresses and replaces my SIMDebian project). 2. Allows us to offload some low-popcon, or QA-questionable packages from the archive. Debian's archive size is continuously increasing, but the number of Debian Developers has been staying around 1000 for many many years. Saturation will definitely happen in the future if we do nothing to change - or saturation has already happended. An Archlinux Developer's saturation point may be several thousand (See Felix Yan, an Arch Dev), but a Debian Developer often saturate at, maybe 30~100? Handing over some workload to the user community is not a bad thing, especially for the cold packages. 3. Allows us to accept potential contributors friendly, and possibly form a new user community. The high quality standard of Debian may scare some potential contributors away. In the informal packaging area, it's easier for people to contribute. Look at AUR and Archlinux Trusted Users as example. Of course, we can promote high quality creations from users into debian archive. Just a few of my naive thoughts. If this idea came true, I'll denfinitely be able to continue with TensorFlow and PyTorch packaging, at an significantly lower cost. I'm also happy to throw some of my low-popcon packages to this area, so I can focus on more valuable ones. This idea really excites me. Can we implement it? Best, Mo.