I think you make a valid point about about tracking Debian unstable, or
from my experience with Gentoo, just going along with the latest portage
tree and evolving the system. Having a set package version to a set OS
version is very comforting in the enterprise. It enables me to point at
a system and no, without a doubt, what the exact version of software
something is running.
On the other hand, occasionally, there are packages that sometimes are
not part of the official package list that I'd like to get installed
(newer versions, actually different). At this point, the diversity of
portage is very refreshing. I can easily net install a package and
someone's already worked through getting it compiled and working on my
system.
Now, onto packaging (and this is gonna sound a lot like emerge on
gentoo, I like it!), I'd like to see something that by default has
generic binaries that are compiled in the normal manner. However, there
are times that I'd like to select specific "features" of the binaries.
In gentoo these are called USE flags and let you easily get some
optimized binaries that will do only what you want. Not everyone is
interested in that much flexibility, but when you're trying to get that
extra 10% of performance out of a system, it's priceless.
As you can imagine from the comments above, I'd like to see all of this
tied to a release tree so that there's no way for your box to update
itself into an unworkable state automagically on you.
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