> My software is a victim of Debian maintainers as well: they chose to remove the default theme from our static site generator, because it was built on top of Bootstrap 3, but Debian only shipped Bootstrap 2 at the time in a global package (they also changed the bootstrap 2 theme to use symlinks to the global version)
As a Debian stable devotee, this seems reasonable to me. If I wanted each package to bring along & manage its own dependencies, I'd use flatpaks.
> How is this “better integration with the philosophy”?
I'm guessing Bootstrap 3 wasn't yet in whatever release/channel your software was being packaged for?
Can't you imagine any possible benefits of not shipping bootstrap v2 and Bootstrap v3? Or do you just disagree with the Debian unstable -> testing -> stable philosophy? Dependency juggling is just one of the issues distro package maintainers have to wrangle with, that upstream maintainers typically don't care about - an upstream project can declare "this version requires the latest glibc", but distro packagers may have to patch around that because the latest version of glibc hasn't been through testing.
We ship a copy of bootstrap within our data files. They could just leave it as-is and have it working. Bootstrap is a CSS/JS library, there is no global /usr/lib to be concerned about.
It is trivial to make the Bootstrap 3 global package install into a different folder than Bootstrap 2. It isn’t so trivial for shared libraries without different sonames, for example.
As a Debian stable devotee, this seems reasonable to me. If I wanted each package to bring along & manage its own dependencies, I'd use flatpaks.
> How is this “better integration with the philosophy”?
I'm guessing Bootstrap 3 wasn't yet in whatever release/channel your software was being packaged for?
Can't you imagine any possible benefits of not shipping bootstrap v2 and Bootstrap v3? Or do you just disagree with the Debian unstable -> testing -> stable philosophy? Dependency juggling is just one of the issues distro package maintainers have to wrangle with, that upstream maintainers typically don't care about - an upstream project can declare "this version requires the latest glibc", but distro packagers may have to patch around that because the latest version of glibc hasn't been through testing.