[amacneil]

Debian is a terrible dependency management solution for adding development dependencies to a workspace (e.g. the same sort of thing npm, cargo, and uv are used for).

As far as I can tell, pixi brings the benefits of these types of dependencies, with native support for multiple languages (python and c++ being the big ones).

ROS uses debian packages today (inside a convoluted wrapper), imo it would be much better if it went all in on pixi instead.