Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that Debian's packaging policy shits all over how people actually use and distribute libraries in languages that have native packaging systems -- in my experience both Ruby and Haskell are totally fucked, and Python is done pretty decently considering. The glacial release cycles and pointless package freezing don't help, nor does their anal-retentive insistence on rearranging everything to fit just-so into the…
As far as glacial release cycles are concerned, use Ubuntu, not Debian. Problem solved. And about packages getting rearranged, yeah, I like FreeBSD's ports better too, but you really should be using apt-get only to install rubygems and then use gem rather than apt to install the gems.
It's much worse with Haskell than any other language I know of -- last I checked there were two broken+old builds of ghc with different names and mutually-exclusive sets of packages that depended on them. On top of that the version of cabal (Haskell's packaging tool) in the repository was so far out of date that you couldn't use it to build anything remotely recent (including useful versions of itself), nor could you use it with anything in Hackage (the central repo).