Is there a reason why the juliareleases ppa couldn't provide a julia0.4 package, separately from the currently julia package? I've seen similar things done with packages elsewhere, including within the main ubuntu repositories. Indeed, given the changes happening to the language, perhaps it's a good idea to start keeping major versions of julia separate (that is, make it julia0.3 and julia0.4, with julia being a dependency package that will pull in the latest stable julia (ie/ it will point to julia0.3 until julia0.4 is properly released, then it will point to julia0.4).
This also minimises issues for people who might have julia 0.3 currently installed and are actively using it, and don't want to accidentally update to 0.4 and have to alter all of their code to account for changes in the language - they would just remove the dependency package, and be guaranteed to remain with julia0.3 only. I do understand why it might be considered too much of a nuisance for the relatively short RC period, when we can wait for the proper release, but I'm probably not the only person who isn't up to using an in-development version (nightlies), but is willing to use one that might just be slightly buggy (release candidate), and who doesn't want to fiddle with installation or compilation. On Monday, 21 September 2015 00:47:10 UTC+10, Tony Kelman wrote: > > Actually it would be expected for julianightlies to be providing 0.5-dev > nightlies right now but it's been failing to update for some time due to > build system changes on master. We have more flexibility and control over > the linux tarball binaries than we do over the ppa. I don't think the ppa > has any effective mechanism to provide release candidates right now.
