iSeries 400 has an interview with Kyle about his book, The Official Ubuntu Server Book.
They ask him technical questions that sound complicated. A sample:
In chapter three, “Package Management,” you mention that packaging is usually done by distributions such as Ubuntu. However, users of distributions and software vendors can also create packages. Can you explain why a user or vendor would create a package instead of letting distributions do the work?
Generally speaking I advocate that users stick with distribution packages whenever possible. When you manage any significant amount of servers one of the most valuable things you can have is consistency and stability. The moment you build your own package, you lose many of the advantages you get when hundreds or thousands of people are hammering away on the same exact package. But, sometimes a system administrator might want either a cutting edge version of a program that hasn’t been packaged yet or wants to add custom features that don’t exist in the standard package. While that can be risky, it is one reason why people build their own packages. A less risky reason is if you have your own set of custom scripts or programs that you want to deploy. While many administrators might just copy scripts to servers by hand, if you build them into a package you can take advantage of the packaging infrastructure you already have in place which makes revision tracking, automated deployment, and a number of other things easier.
Read the rest of the interview here!