Scott James Remnant bothers to write a technical reply why "autopackage" isn't any better than the existing package manager.

Why do you actually bother? I mean, I've never seen any autopackage package, and the only times I've heard about it are on LWN and your blog posts.

Autopackage, in my opinion, is a pointless effort. I actually have the impression that they (still) havn't encountered all the kinds of conflicts and dependencies we can see in Debian, and where the dependency handling of dpkg and apt comes in.

They also probably aren't aware of the smartness in the Debian build-package tools, that basically take all the work away from the average package builder to actually write library dependencies. (And for the library package maintainer it's also very convenient if he only has to specify which package versions are compatible...)

I also do not agree that their install process is in any way convenient.

I'm not the average stupid windows user, who wants to download another bad freeware application (or some warez copy) and install it. I also don't need the latest upstream version usually: I've seen to many new issues arise in the newest, so I'm fine with the one that has recieved enough regression testing...

But why don't we just ignore autopackage? Noone uses it, noone needs it - it will just go away.

I love toying around with google. In case you haven't known, Google offers Alerts, which includes new hits for a search query. I use this for example to monitor links to my ssddiff project (my xmldiff variant, which supposedly is better at preserving structure). This works well because noone else uses this abbreviation (which, btw, is for semi-structured-data-diff, since the algorithms should work fine with any semistructured data, including rdf or arbitrary labeled graphs).

Since Googlism still only claims that I'm "responsible for this debian package" (apparently taken from the enigma package), I of course have to teach google otherwise:

Erich Schubert is messing with google.