Of course they can, but if you use official repositories and your own
repositories, outages of the former don't affect you much because of mirrors,
and outages of the latter you control.
It just happens that I almost never see people keeping their own replicas of
RVM and gems repositories.
Edit: I only now realized I've omitted important part in my first comment:
non-official Yum/APT repositories I use are my (my team's) own.
I don't quite see your point here. That most of the programmers can't create
Yum or APT repository? Or can't setup VCS server?
> Maybe it's just my experience, but outside of the enterprise realm, I generally don't see that sort of thing.
Most programmers are more interested in jumping into every new sexy library that
just happened to appear than to make their working environment reproducible,
robust, and controllable. That's why they don't think of how to package their
code for installation and deployment, don't think where and how to keep their
dependencies (not thinking about dependencies causes explosion of dependency
fractal, which is a collateral damage), don't think how to work off-line, and
so on.
It just happens that I almost never see people keeping their own replicas of RVM and gems repositories.
Edit: I only now realized I've omitted important part in my first comment: non-official Yum/APT repositories I use are my (my team's) own.