Distributions

Posted Feb 3, 2025 15:17 UTC (Mon) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118)
In reply to: Distributions by leephillips
Parent article: New horizons for Julia

> but, as warned on the official Julia download page, you shouldn’t use these packages

Any free software project that posts this kind of "warnings" earns my immediate distrust, and it would take *a lot* to offset it.

> Such packages are typically put together by people involved with the distributions, not the developers of the packaged software.

And that's how it should be.

Distributions

Posted Feb 3, 2025 15:41 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> > Such packages are typically put together by people involved with the distributions, not the developers of the packaged software.

> And that's how it should be.

And that's how it SHOULDN'T be. Would you want your car serviced at the local garage by an unsupervised apprentice?

IF (unlikely) I ever get any software of mine into a mainstream distro, I would consider it very important that I provide up-to-date build options for any distributions of importance to me. Probably Gentoo, SUSE, Slackware. I would expect any collaborators to do the same for distributions of importance to them.

Expecting people who aren't involved with the software (*especially* if it's under active and rapid development) to package it is just asking for something to go wrong.

Cheers,
Wol

Distributions

Posted Feb 3, 2025 17:26 UTC (Mon) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]

And that's how it SHOULDN'T be. Would you want your car serviced at the local garage by an unsupervised apprentice?

I don’t like this analogy because it presumes there is only one field of expertise that matters. I fully accept that the developers of a program are the experts in that domain; but packaging itself (and distribution specific facets) are another relevant domain entirely, which upstream developers rarely are expert in. I agree there’s a problem here. But the way you’ve presented it I think misses important nuances.

Distributions

Posted Feb 3, 2025 16:00 UTC (Mon) by leephillips (subscriber, #100450) [Link] (6 responses)

“Any free software project that posts this kind of "warnings" earns my immediate distrust”

But this sort of thing is extremely common, because packages from distributions are so often useless.

Just looking at some of the free software I use every day:

The Mutt (the email client I use) official wiki instructs users to install by downloading the source from mutt.org and compiling.

Dwm (the window manager I use) tells users to download source and install, pointing out that it would be “pointless” to distribute binary packages.

Pandoc recommends downloading from pandoc.org to get a recent version.

LaTeX: they mention that distribution packages are typically out of date and direct users to download from the project.

Distributions

Posted Feb 3, 2025 16:22 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Okay, this story is many years old (I don't know how long I've been using gentoo, but it's a LOT of years), the reason I switched to gentoo was because I was running the latest SUSE, the latest distro version of lilypond, and for whatever reason I needed a much newer version of lilypond.

Cheers,
Wol

Distributions

Posted Feb 3, 2025 17:29 UTC (Mon) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] (2 responses)

But this sort of thing is extremely common, because packages from distributions are so often useless.

This framing is disingenuous. The mutt package, to pick your example, is obviously not useless; it’s widely used by many people. I used it myself for at least 20 years. I’m sure that you’re right, the upstream maintainer would prefer I used a more recent release, but that’s a different matter from the older version being useless.

Distributions

Posted Feb 3, 2025 17:43 UTC (Mon) by leephillips (subscriber, #100450) [Link] (1 responses)

I admit that an out-of-date package might not be useless, and in fact I use some of them where it doesn’t matter to me whether I have a recent release. But my statement is still true, that “packages from distributions are so often useless”.

Distributions

Posted Feb 3, 2025 18:14 UTC (Mon) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

I'm not sure useless is a, well, useful term here. Perhaps what you mean to say is that packages from the distribution are older than you or other users would prefer, or that they may be altered in some way that is less optimal for some or many users—for example, those who depend on / want a vanilla upstream version/experience.

If that is what's meant, I don't think that's controversial at all. I am quite happy to get the bulk of my software from my distribution of choice, but I do compile certain things (e.g., aerc) from source because I want the very, very latest as it's still pretty new and fixes and features land regularly. OTOH, I am not going to bother to compile VLC, Foliate, Pandoc, or ffmpeg myself unless there's a really good reason.

Distributions

Posted Feb 3, 2025 17:35 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

This is different.
They tell you how to get the latest version, they do not tell you that you should not use distro version.
(it should be noted that lot of linux users are running very old LTS release like Ubuntu 18.04 which can be annoying to upstream, but it is not the distributions fault).

Mutt
"Figure out if you have a mutt installed already by entering "mutt -v" at the prompt. If you have none yet, or the displayed configuration doesn't suit your needs, grab the source from http://www.mutt.org/download.html and "do it yourself": install mutt."

DWN
"Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it's pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions. There are some distributions that provide binary packages though."

PANDOC
"Check whether the pandoc version in your package manager is not outdated. Pandoc is in the Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, Arch, Fedora, NixOS, openSUSE, gentoo and Void repositories."

LaTex
"Check your Linux distributions software source for a TeX distribution including LaTeX. You can also install the current TeX Live distribution directly---in fact this may be advisable as many Linux distributions only contain older versions of TeX Live, see Linux TeX Live package status for details."

Distributions

Posted Feb 13, 2025 8:55 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

I use mutt, pandoc, and latex from Debian oldstable, and I find them useful. Of course they do not offer newer features, but that does not make the old versions useless. If you think that the current upstream version of mutt, pandoc, and latex are useful, why would they become useless in the future?

OTOH, the Debian package maims gforth by deleting the manual (they do not put it into non-free or something, they just do not distribute it at all). This makes Debian's Gforth distribution mostly useless without internet access; ok, not completely useless: It still can be used for building upstream Gforth from git (but there are frequent snapshot tarballs of upstream Gforth, so that benefit is small).