Hi, Il 28/12/19 11:32, Benoit ha scritto: > Hi Giovanni, > I am wondering: what are the advantages of having a Debian package over > the current method ? (This is a genuine, not a rhetorical question.) I > am using Debian testing, and everytime I want a new version of Metamath > (and I generally want the newest), I download the zip from > http://us2.metamath.org/#downloads, then I read the README.TXT because I > always forget that the command is > gcc m*.c -o metamath -O3 -funroll-loops -finline-functions > -fomit-frame-pointer -Wall -pedantic -DINLINE=inline > then I type it, and I'm good to go.
That's a lot of work already, compared to just "apt install metamath" without having to check out any file. And you haven't even considered the problem of understanding what to download: the GitHub repository? The source distributed on the metamath website? What is the relationship between the two? For you and me this is obvious, not so much for someone discovering metamath for the first time. Then, granted, metamath is probably a software for which the convenience ratio between packaged and not packaged is relatively small. But any user might be interested in many programs, and in order to keep all of them up-to-date they have to do a specific manual process for each of them (and sometimes this process might change because of changes in the build system, dependencies or whatever). Compared to just "apt update; apt upgrade" for all packages at once. I'd say that even for something as straightforward as metamath there is no race. Think also for people administrating lots of computers, for example in a university: if you have metamath in Debian, you just add the name to the list of packages that must be installed on each computer in your system management tool (Puppet, Ansible, whatever). Otherwise you have to sort everything out by yourself. If a package is really special for you, because you are a developer or such a power user that even being one commit behind master is an impairment for you, then by all means ignore the packaged version and compile your own. But for all other users, I believe there is nothing like the distribution's official repositories. It's not just a matter of convenience, but also of trust. Debian users usually trust Debian packages: they know that most probably they will just work, that they install files conforming to a well-known policy, they know that if they uninstall the package then everything is just gone. If you have to compile things yourself, you always need to check manually of those things, if you care about keeping your filesystem clean. > Also, how is the package updated ? I mean : you uploaded version 0.180 > this morning to the Debian queue, so the version we will have in the > stable Debian two years from now, will it be 0.180, whereas the version > then will be, say, 0.192 ? The version we will have in Debian bullseye when it will be released will not (probably) be 0.180, but the last one that I uploaded before bullseye enters its freeze stage. On the other hand, it is true that that version will not be further updated during the bullseye life cycle: Debian stable is meant to be stable (however, I will keep updating the package in unstable and testing). This is what Debian users expect and (hopefully) want. This is what happens for all other pieces of software and it is perfectly normal. If important bugs (like security bugs, or bugs that severely impact the usability of the package) emerge after it has been released in Debian stable, it is still possible to fix them with targeted patches. There are dedicated repositories for that. But in that case we just fix the important bug, not upload a completely new version. And the opportunity to do this is carefully weighed against the risk of introducing new bugs in working setups. If a stable user really needs an updated version of a packaged software, there is also another available channel, which is debian-backports. This is not an official Debian distribution, but it is still endorsed by the project, it upholds to the same Debian quality standards and is well known and trusted by the users. I think that all these options cover the needs of an important share of users of most Debian packages. Again, metamath might be a bit of a corner case because it is a simple software, with a rather targeted users community. But given that the effort for me is so little, I believe it is totally worth it. BTW, most of what I say is probably true for any Linux distribution. I am not saying that Debian is special. It just happens that I use and contribute to it. Hope this explains, Giovanni. -- Giovanni Mascellani <[email protected]> Postdoc researcher - Université Libre de Bruxelles -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Metamath" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/metamath/c7213ef4-de9a-beab-eeab-0c9e60428c2f%40gmail.com.
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