Ubuntu, ownCloud, and a hidden dark side of Linux software repositories (PC World)

Software should really be built and packaged by upstream in most cases, except for lower-level OS stuff. It would be, in my more perfect world, be the job of the distributions to help upstream do this and make it as easy as possible.

1) They are way too aggressive about removing packages from the repository. This often leads to situations where upgrading/installing something pulls in a dependency that's so new it forces upgrades of 50 other packages (and then the process repeats), even though an older version of the package that's been removed from the tree would have avoided the problem.

2) The revdep-rebuild approach to reverse dependency tracking means that you can't always see how big of a mess this will be until you are in the middle of it.

However, if you're willing to pull old packages out of Gentoo's CVS and stick them in a local overlay, you can quite reasonably do what you want here. It just requires a bit more manual effort than it should.

You also run into the general problem that the dependency information in the packages is not always ideal, simply because very few people are testing very new packages in combination with very old ones, so sometimes things get missed (e.g., foo-2.3 requires >=libbar-1.2, but there were no versions of libbar older than 1.2 in the tree when foo-2.3 was packaged, so nobody remembered to update the rule).

But I will say that I have run into similar problems with every distro I've used, and Gentoo is the only one where I have been able to sit down and reasonably solve such problems, every time, in less time than it would have taken to just give up and re-image the OS with the latest Fedora release or whatever.

Whereas someone running, say, Windows 7 (because they don't want to touch 8) can trivially use the latest Firefox and Python while remaining on Office 2010.