> The convenience of a package manager goes away when you have to package everything yourself before you can use it.
Far from it. You get repeatable builds and deployments, much easier and faster
setup of development environment (GCC and -devel packages and
foreign-language tools pulled in automatically), and you don't make
intractable mess on your servers, which allows you to use much wider range of
tools than architecturally broken Ansible/Salt.
> I also don't use Debian.
Irrelevant. Every Linux distribution and most other unix operating systems use
some package manager, most of which in turn are more or less equivalent to
APT.
Far from it. You get repeatable builds and deployments, much easier and faster setup of development environment (GCC and -devel packages and foreign-language tools pulled in automatically), and you don't make intractable mess on your servers, which allows you to use much wider range of tools than architecturally broken Ansible/Salt.
> I also don't use Debian.
Irrelevant. Every Linux distribution and most other unix operating systems use some package manager, most of which in turn are more or less equivalent to APT.