Versioning the julia package name in the ppa would be a very good idea. The only reason the PPA is often out of date is that it's entirely maintained by a single person who doesn't always have the time to fix things that break or update things that would usually be handled automatically. As I said it takes more maintenance to keep running than the tarball builds, and since the PPA is Ubuntu-specific we've been encouraging people to use the generic tarballs now since we have more control over dependencies, public visibility to any issues that arise, and the ability for multiple people to fix them. I recognize the utility in having your system package manager handle updates, but it's a fair bit more maintenance work. Downloading and installing a tarball to use the binaries of Julia should be pretty easy, and doesn't need root access either.
On Sunday, September 20, 2015 at 8:37:57 AM UTC-7, Glen O wrote: > > 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. > >
