Linux Distributions' Tracking of Upstream Projects Examined 132
An anonymous reader writes "Linux distributions track upstream projects, releasing a particular version with each official release. But how far behind the latest versions do these releases linger? Scott Shawcroft did an interesting new study into this relationship between distributions and upstream projects. Shawcroft says: 'Over the last 10 months I've been working on Linux evolution research. Similar to distrowatch, I track the current versions of packages in a number of distributions and the current upstream version. Based on that data I then graph a number of metrics to understand the relationship between upstream and downstream.' His presentation on the topic scheduled for [this] week's open source convention, OSCON, should provide an interesting insight into that relationship. Currently he is tracking 20 projects including the Linux kernel, Firefox, GCC, OpenSSH and GNOME on Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE, Sabayon, Slackware, and Ubuntu."
What's Firefox? (Score:5, Funny)
I run Debian you insensitive clod!
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I'm sure he's translating between Iceweasel and Firefox properly... I'm still kind of disappointed that they haven't upgrade IW to 3.5 though.
On another note, if you want bleeding edge (without rolling your own), it looks like Arch is where it's at? I was thinking about switching from Debian to Arch and this data is intriguing to me.
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It's available in experimental. See packages.debian.org/iceweasel [debian.org] and bug #535192 [debian.org].
Re:What's Firefox? (Score:4, Funny)
If I ever find a woman named Debbie Ann, I'll marry her.
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Close, but no cigar. Marriage and sex are two different things.
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Slashdotter: Hey, so after the movie you want to go to my place?
Babe: Sure
Slashdotter: Here it is! *walks in*
Mom: Hey honey, how was the date?
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Women hardly want it as it is, and nerds are a total turn off.
Trust, me, son. You just don't know the right women.
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Star Wars, Empire, and parts of Jedi...
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If I ever find a woman named Debbie Ann, I'll marry her.
And you could always have Amanda as a backup!
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Deb already married Ian. They should put out a distro.
But what if it's a girl? Would she be Distra?
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I run DOS you insensitive clod!
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What's DOS? I run ITS and I'm posting this from the original Emacs, you insensitive clod!
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I run MCP and how do you run two operating systems on top of each other?
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I run MCP and how do you run two operating systems on top of each other?
With Emacs, it ain't hard.
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With Emacs, it ain't hard.
You do know that they have medicines for that... v1AgrA, C1alis, etc...
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Well I run Slackware which ranks just as bad as Debian. The upside is that most big iron companies run deprecated version of Linux, some still run kernel 2.4.X. They only patch their systems with security updates.
The idea is that newer packages might have security bugs in them that aren't found yet. Packages which have been around for years have less chances to contain undisclosed security bugs. Recent Firefox 3.5 security bugs tend to confirm this principle.
So it doesn't bother me at all that Slackware ran
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Debian! Isn't that Ubuntu Lite?
Re:What's Firefox? (Score:5, Funny)
Actually Ubuntu is an African word that means "one who is unable to install Debian".
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Heard it attributed to him recently, shamelessly stole it for my own use here. :-)
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The truth hurts buddy. :-)
Tracking Debian Stable instead of Testing (Score:3, Informative)
In Debian, all software in the repositories is frozen when a release is cut (e.g. Lenny). Only security updates are applied. If the author is going for accuracy, he should track Debian Testing, which gets updated frequently with new releases of various packages. The name "testing" is somewhat misleading. Packages in testing are considered stable enough for everyday use. The stable branch is intended to minimize updates, which is what you'd want for servers.
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As an alternative, Debian could fix their release process (they still consider critical bugs of almost unknow and barely used packages as release-critical bugs that can stop the release of widely used and know packages with no critical bugs?).
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(they still consider critical bugs of almost unknow and barely used packages as release-critical bugs that can stop the release of widely used and know packages with no critical bugs?).
Not true. Unfixed release-critical bugs in unknown and barely used packages result in the package being removed from the release, not the release being delayed.
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There is nothing wrong with Debian's release process. The problem lies with release-centric management that refuses to install packages from Debian testing. Debian testing is, in my long and varied desktop experience, more stable than Ubuntu (with a 6 month release cycle mostly based on Debian testing) AND more up to date. For any usage except a mission critical server, I would recommend Debian testing over Debian stable.
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(with a 6 month release cycle mostly based on Debian testing)
Ubuntu's upstream is sid, not testing.
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Technically true, but from what I have seen there is more lag in the Ubuntu release cycle than the average unstable->testing transition for Debian. Which means that, on average, that Ubuntu packages are already in Debian testing by the time they are released as part of Ubuntu.
Similar with Ubuntu LTS (Score:2)
But Ubuntu doesn't offer many recent app versions (like Firefox 3.5) for an OS that is merely 18 months old. You have to be fairly expert to do the upgrades yourself, downloading and resolving dependencies or finding a source for backports... and both options are often pretty unsatisfactory even to those of us with the know-how (lack of proper testing, subtly botched compiler and integration options, packages that cause headaches on subsequent system updates, etc.).
In the case of upgrading Firefox, you must
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Are you kidding? Are you confusing Debian and Ubuntu?
Installing the newer Firefox (3.5) from repositories was not a problem.
Installing the newer Firefox was also not a problem from the tarball (just untar and run).
Stuff like "backports" are a part of the standard set of repositories.
Using discrete packages is also pretty easy (skype) as are discrete installers (penumbra,vmware,oracle,word perfect).
The WHOLE POINT of debian (and children) is the fact that dependencies are automatically dealt with.
apt-get eve
Get your head out of that dark, wet place! (Score:2)
Installing the newer Firefox (3.5) from repositories was not a problem.
Excuse you, but: .mozilla folder duplicated might not be the best idea, depending on what extensions are being used. Likewise, a user that is uncertain about the tandem Firefoxes might los
* Renaming the browser to "Shiretoko" is a problem
* Nor is the icon recognizable to a Firefox user
* Not having it replace 3.0 (and having it run in tandem with 3.0) is a problem
* Pulling in most of the Gnome desktop on a KDE system is a problem
* If you're on a netbook or similarly space-constrained system, having the whole
Potayto potahto (Score:5, Insightful)
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To those with more dollars than sense, %NotBleedingEdge == %Obsolete.
Re:Potayto potahto (Score:5, Insightful)
And all of that work should be done by the application authors, not people who work on the OS who don't know what they are doing. I repeat: Ability to work on an operating system doesn't mean you know squat about sanely-coded and presented applications.
This dynamic is why Firefox on FOSS systems is slow and feature-poor: A party that can't possibly take responsibility for all the apps being offered is inserting themselves between the application users and the authors, degrading what is otherwise a top-notch effort (Firefox).
Think about that the next time radio buttons disappear after selecting (only on Linux Firefox for years), self-update keeps prompting when it couldn't even work, users are urged to "get the latest!" while they are forced to wait weeks (or forever) after their Mac and PC colleagues have upgraded, and when you click on a link and get prompted to "select application" to open with... and the dialog doesn't show applications but the Unix filesystem instead.
Self-updating applications is an application feature, not an OS feature. People need approachable ways to install new and updated apps on OSes that are older than a few months! No one should be forced to the bleeding edge of OS releases every 6 months just to upgrade their apps.
It all speaks of an OS that isn't feature-stable enough to give app developers a chance to properly target and integrate with the system. This problem of poor testing and integration arising from poor targetability is repeated over the whole spectrum of available applications.
Stop releasing every 6 months and get the distro managers out of the applications.
PS- I would also like to state what a POS the Slashdot editor has become.
Re:Potayto potahto (Score:5, Insightful)
Distro/package maintainers tend to be the only thing keeping Linux sane with the endless dependencies on libraries that again rely on other libraries with turtles all the way down. It's might work poorly for the five applications that are basically big enough to roll their own framework but for all the Gnome/KDE apps that would be just terrible.
I don't know why firefox is bugging me but my guess it's because the developers are lazy... there's a little perl app called apt-show-versions:
kjella@kjella-desktop:~$ apt-show-versions firefox
firefox/jaunty-security uptodate 3.0.11+build2+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.04.1
See that? It is up to date, and stop bloody bugging me about it. I'm sure the same could be done with an #ifdef LINUX and a few lines in C if anyone would bother, it doesn't even take a sudo. Do you know that when I go in Opera, right-click a file in the transfer window I do get a list of my Linux applications to open it with? They got sub-percent market share and do it right, but Firefox can't be arsed to do it. Why should I think it's the maintainer's fault when the developers can't be arsed to do the things they can do? Face it, Linux is maybe 5% of the total Firefox userbase now and we're getting the same shit we are with closed source apps.
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there's a little perl app called apt-show-versions:
There is also apt-cache policy *packagename* which is mighty useful when tracking several Debian branches (e.g. unstable+experimental).
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Dude, the current version of Firefox is 3.5, not 3.0.11+build2+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.04.1.barf.barf.barf.
This is so pathetic. And no, your package manager + repo didn't even do a half-assed job.
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It's not because you're used to another paradigm that the Linux distribution one isn't appreciated by other people
Releasing every 6 months allows me to get new _system features_, not new apps. Most of the time I already got the apps I need thanks to appropriate sources. It's easy to add sources for the few things you might want to keep bleeding edge, e.g. browser, chat, office? The rest I am happy to have it stable.
But most of the time, I don't have a need to upgrade an application. And every 6 months I am
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Think installing newer MS Office screws up your IE, or the other way around.
Not on a Mac it won't. But why bother yourself with the gold standard for the desktop when MS's poor engineering can be used as an excuse for poor engineering in FOSS.
fair comparison ? (Score:3, Informative)
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...on the other hand, maybe it would not be fair to compare karmic current stability with that of a released fedora?
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Fedora is not a dev release.
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Not to mention Jaunty isn't a LTS release, so you can't really compare it to RHEL for long-term stable releases.
I've run most of the top of that list. I liked arch, but at the moment I'm much happier with Ubuntu. Install once, most things I need are there so I don't have to dork around with trying to install the packages I need and make gnome integrate everything, etc...
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Either way, comparing Ubuntu and Fedora is a pretty good comparison to me. Both Fedora and Ubuntu claim to be stable and for mass consumption by the end user.
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Fedora isn't a dev release. Fedora-11 is the stable track. Fedora-devel is the development track.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/collections/id/21 [fedoraproject.org] - Stable
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/collections/id/8 [fedoraproject.org] - Development
Comparison to Jaunty is perfectly valid, as Jaunty is kept up to date with "stable" packages from time to time.
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Who wants fair? There was plenty missing here, for example RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu LTS and Debian are probably in the same class but only Debian was in the survey. This was more like a sample with a spread, showing the spread between bleeding edge distros and stable distros. That said, my impression is that they picked a very round-about way of figuring out the age. Ubuntu has a release every six months, so the average age is close to 6mo/2 = ~13 weeks. Debian has 18 months, so 18mo/2 = ~39 weeks. Unless you're
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I was a long term ubuntu users, but im now on Fedora11 and its perecty...*no carrier*
He fails to see.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Its no surprise that Arch makes it to the top being a rolling distro, that is, one that doesn't have "releases" like Ubuntu, Debian, etc. but rather upgrades the packages as it goes along. Similarly, Fedora and Ubuntu tend to release pretty often, Ubuntu releases every 6 months and Fedora releases pretty fast. Gentoo/Funtoo are very similar to Arch. Sabyon, Slackware, Debian and SuSE don't release new versions very often. I also find it odd that they are testing Debian stable rather than testing or unstable.
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I also find it odd that they are testing Debian stable rather than testing or unstable.
Technically, they're also testing Arch Stable, Fedora Stable, Ubuntu Stable, etc. You can't make a direct comparison if you're tipping the stakes in the direction of your favorite distribution.
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It's perfectly fair to point out that, if you're using the stable version of Debian (which is what you should be using for any production purposes), you won't be using the most up-to-date version of most of the software you're using. Debian is, relative to other distros, very slow to incorporate updates into their stable version.
Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of debate, but the only thing that I think is unfair is using the word "obsolete".
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Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of debate, but the only thing that I think is unfair is using the word "obsolete".
How could it be anything other than a good thing, since the only difference between Debian stable, Debian testing, and Debian unstable, is how long they have been tested and "seasoned", and everyone in the past whom ever selected stable, selected it because it is the most seasoned and tested distribution around? The stable users would rightly be mighty annoyed if we started randomly uploading stuff directly into stable without any testing and seasoning, rather than unstable.
Its like complaining bud-lite is
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Whether it's "good" or not depends on your end goals.
Yes, if I'm running a server, I want rock-hard stability. Latest version, don't need it unless it has security patches.
For my day-to-day usage and development machine, I'm okay with bleeding edge stuff from time to time. If it crashes, meh, I can back up a version or two.
Different uses, different desires. Having to wait for FireFox (IceWeasel, whatever) 3.5 for months after release on my box is unacceptable. Building it myself is certainly possible, but j
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The simple point is that he should have classed Debian Stable and Debian Unstable as separate distributions.
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Yeah my take on it is 95% of Debian has been around for a while and
has been field tested so it's probably a good fit for that mission
critical server your about to build.
I don't need the latest and greatest most of the time, just something
that I know, with confidence, will work well for a particular purpose.
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The mystifying part of his calculation is that Debian Lenny was frozen exactly 51 weeks ago on Jul 27th 2008.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/07/msg00007.html [debian.org]
Yet, somehow, the "average lag" for Debian Lenny is a mere 40 weeks, when it should approach 51 weeks as of today... I do not believe there have been THAT many security related patches, have there?
Also obsolete is the wrong word. By the definition, "No longer in use" it obviously fails by the definition of being included in the dis
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!Obsolete (Score:2)
I agree, using "obsolete" is bordering on flamebait. And the meaning of these figures are unclear; at a first guess, I'd think "% obsolete" meant "percentage of programs with a newer upstream version", but then how a figure of 78.94% come about when the sample size is 20 packages? I can't figure out what "Avg # New Rels" means at all, or over what sort of time period.
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The notion of obsolenece is also quite strange. Some software can be released but should not be used. I am thinking KDE 4.0 which was completely broken. I also recal gnuplot 4.0 that brings a lot a regression. regression in the kernel are also common due to driver which are not yet ported.
All in all, I am not sure being close to the upstream is a good property for a distribution. Providing a coherent user experience is probably different from being up to date. Of course, it does not stand true for security
Re:He fails to see.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Its no surprise that Arch makes it to the top being a rolling distro, that is, one that doesn't have "releases" like Ubuntu, Debian, etc.
I run Debian testing [debian.org]. It's very much a rolling release, and you're somewhat protected against obvious bugs by the nice policy. Of course, you can get more rolling than that and go full unstable. And throw in some experimental if you're feeling brave.
The nice thing is you can mix-and-match. Most of my packages are testing, some are unstable, and right now i have a touch of experimental. With some APT pinning, you get a rolling release where you can decide per-package how bleeding edge you want to be.
This is my laptop/desktop. For servers I mostly stick to stable, and if i really need a newer package I can pin it from testing, or look for it on backports.org.
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The issue with Debian is complex. At work, we use Debian testing for desktops in the IT section, but Debian stable for servers.
With developer desktops, a little occasional instability is no huge problem - you want to test the next generation of your software (e.g. the latest Apache, PHP, database, etc).
On your production servers you want stability, even if that means running older releases. Your production servers are not the place to run beta software. And you want long uptimes on your servers (uptime on d
What about distros further downstream? (Score:2)
Tracking the projects is one thing. Testing and integration by the top-level distributions can take some time, and it'd defeat the purpose of using them if they didn't take the time to smooth out bumps of using a bunch of different packages together.
To me, a more interesting question is how far behind do the second and third tier distributions that source from Arch, Red Hat, Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, OpenSuse, Ubuntu, Slackware, and Puppy lag behind? Obviously with Yellow Dog, White Box, CentOS, PCLinux OS,
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Some distros (notably Slackware, Mandriva, and Sabayon themselves) went from being based on other distros and started at some point doing the package integrations themselves.
I could be wrong, but I believe Sabayon still uses portage and the Gentoo portage repository directly. They potentially have their own packages in their overlay, but AFAIK you can't really say they do the package integrations themselves. They still very much rely on upstream Gentoo.
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That's a special case, then, if they use the same portage repositories as Gentoo for all but their distribution-specific files. That means the packages the Sabayon team puts together are the only ones they have to worry about so long as they don't break portage. Any lag from the individual projects to Sabayon for most packages would then be only what Gentoo users would get anyway.
Barry Kauler (the guy behind Puppy) has always worked hard on the automated rebuilding of the distro, including remastering a Pup
Older versions of distributions? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Older versions of distributions? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know about those distributions, but I backport packages from Fedora to RHEL frequently. It's simple, really: just grab the fedora srpm and run rpmbuild on it. Most of the time, it'll work fine. Occasionally, you might need to adjust the spec file to accommodate some slight differences, but it's not a big deal. You end up with a package that integrates nicely with the package manager, satisfies dependencies in the normal way, and so on.
Also, I'm not sure why the parent is moderated flamebait. It's a legitimate to want to run a stable distribution, but use later versions of particular packages.
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Is this the right metric? (Score:2)
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No, there were some pretty graphs but generally it said very little about distro upstream interaction. The comments ,which sometimes provide insight round here, where additionally bleak talking only about release schedules and squabbling over who's distro has the newest penis!
Linux package management is a mess (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong, I *do* like the general idea of package management. It is nice to have the OS take care of keeping everything up to date, and having it Just Work. But there are a handful of software I use every day, (Firefox, Filezilla, Pidgin, Deluge come to mind) that I want to always hav
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But there are a handful of software I use every day, (Firefox, Filezilla, Pidgin, Deluge come to mind) that I want to always have the latest released version - and on Ubuntu that is a pain in the ass.
Sounds like you're way down the distribution food chain and want to move up. My advice is let the other folks in the food chain do all the debugging for you unless there is some desperate genuine need to have it now. But if you enjoy the pain:
1) Ubuntu is just a derivative repack of Debian. Move upstream to Debian.
2) Sounds like you're using the equivalent of Debian stable or Debian testing. Move upstream to testing, or unstable.
But first consider the difference between "i want" and "i need". Somebody
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Re:Linux package management is a mess (Score:4, Interesting)
In fact, it was that very problem which originally caused me to drop RedHat Linux back in the late 90s and go to compiling everything from scratch (I then migrated to Gentoo to automate things). And despite the memes, it doesn't take nearly as long to compile everything on modern hardware as some would have you believe. A full rebuild of my system takes about 24 hours (AMD64 X2 4400+, 1002 packages installed), but I do that maybe once a year. It usually amounts to 10-20 minutes a day.
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More importantly, that's 10-20 minutes (or 24 hours) of unattended installation -- only the computer is busy, not you.
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There are PPA repositories for those masochistic enough to want to work with nightly builds. For instance the following repo has nightly builds of Firefox.
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa/ubuntu [launchpad.net] jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa/ubuntu [launchpad.net] jaunty main
It's also possible to add Debian unstable or testing to your repositories, but set the preferred distribution to Jaunty (Package>Preferences>Distribution in synaptic). Then you can selectively install ce
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You want Gentoo. Build a stable system and then unmask the particular packages that you want to get a new version of. Then let your system rebuild them. If you want bleeding edge, then you can set free some of the packages that have been hard masked. But do so at your own risk. Regardless, it's Gentoo that you want.
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I'm running Arch Linux and Vista dual-boat and I'm in LUA mode in Vista; I don't have any problems with app's auto-updating on Vista. The apps check for updates, asks for the admin password and sometimes I have to click the next button a couple times. Running as Admin get real noisey it's do you want to do this, do you really want to do this, are you sure you really want to do this; then you get to click the next button a couple times. I think using Linux first is a benefit when use Vista, it behaves like I
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1) Ubuntu is just a derivative repack of Debian. Move upstream to Debian.
2) Sounds like you're using the equivalent of Debian stable or Debian testing. Move upstream to testing, or unstable.
Or get rid of Debian and install a distro which doesn't cause you to want to kill someone or break something every five minutes.
- Non-sane defaults. Vim's Debian conf is ok, but that's about the only app I've used where that has been the case. I've re-written or scrapped the dotfiles for virtually every other Debian c
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If you don't like the update/package management, maybe you should try a different distro with a different package management?
I'd personally suggest an rpm based distro like Fedora or Suse. I've used both
Yes, it's still possible to get into dependency hell, but lately I've been able to find yum reposit
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You are probably looking for PPAs on Ubuntu. They are "personal" repositories that users or sometimes communities/distros create to give users bleeding-edge stuff. I understand that your comment about Firefox was an example, but there is an easy fix. In jaunty (9.04), install firefox-3.5 that will get you updated to the most current version. It had the betas and even updated to firefox 3.5.1 the day it was released.
I have a PPA enabled so I could get KDE 4.2.4, and they are really great because I don't want
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All major distros have development tracks. If you want the absolute latest and greatest of some software packages, switch them over to the development versions. How to do this varies depending on your distro, of course. I think Ubuntu separates them out into "Proposed" and such.
Of course, things might break, but then that's what would you'd expect to happen anyway with the bleeding edge.
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The point in ubuntu is being always a couple of months late. You probably want to use a more up to date distribution such as debian unstable (note: unstable does not mean will crash after a reboot, just that they may contain bug).
it is also possible to keep a mixed system, that is to say, use mainly debian stable but borrow some packages from unstable. It uses teh preferences options of APT and you can find information on the debian website http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/ch-apt-get.en.html [debian.org]
BTW,
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It's brain dead easy on Windows to try beta software, and uninstall it if it breaks something. What am I missing on Linux?
/opt
seriously in a worst-case scenario linux package management becomes the same as windows package managment (you install and maintain all versions yourself).
that I want to always have the latest released version
You are on the wrong disto then, /opt and maintaining them yourself (as you would under windows)
If you want the latest version of everything, you definetly want a rolling release distro (sid/arch) of those if you want cutting edge i suggest arch.
If you just want the latest stable version of a few apps, then:
AUR, PPA, (other people compile them and hos
Obsolete vs Stable (Score:3, Insightful)
While the charts are quite nice to look at, they really aren't that meaningful.
.
Ex 1: Debian stable has 95% obsolete packages according to his metrics. For
a rolling release distro that wants to be bleeding edge like eg arch this might
be a bad indication. For a distribution that focuses on stability (like debian
does) this is an (important) design descission. They promise to be rock
solid and they guarantee that no feature changes occur during the support
cycle, and thats exactly what they deliver.
.
Ex 2: Suse is shown to have some 95% outdated packages. What he doesn't
seem to consider is the fact that they do a lot of backporting, especially
in the kde area (kdebase is one of the packages he uses for his analysis).
A Suse version of kde that might seem outdated based on the package
number will probably contain a great number of backported improvements.
.
Another point that I think would be pretty interesting would be security
updates. Not using the latest major release doesn't mean that you don't
have a great security response time (or the other way around). Maybe
he'd be able to track this as well, would be pretty interesting for those
of us who have to rely on stable, tested and secure systems.
.
Anyway, nice thing he started there. If he manages to get some more
metrics this might become a very powerful tool.
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Distributing is not easy, anyway! (Score:4, Insightful)
You can jump up a version or two of a package/project (firefox, gcc, kdebase?) and you end up collecting complaints.
You can miss a version upgrade(linux, postgresql, xorg?) and you and up collecting even more complaints.
Whoever talks about "major version bumps" and ".0 versions" is missing the real point: the need to care about features, reliability and effectiveness.
Version numbers and names are just that: numbers and names. A v0.13 of a package can provide better overall results than a v4.2 of a competitor. And the step from 1.2 to 1.3 can provide much more advances than a 8.10 to 9.04!
Distribution managers should thoroughly test in first person the forthcoming releases (alphas, betas, RCs
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Distribution managers should thoroughly test in first person the forthcoming releases (alphas, betas, RCs ...)
For what, anecdotal evidence and "works4me" tags? Don't get me wrong, it's very important to do QA but I hope the person(s) responsible pulling together thousands of packages to make a distro got better things to do than play QA peon. Things like making sure packages aren't broken, exceptions to freeze windows, what to do with release-critical bugs whether it\s downgrade, upgrade (if upstream has fixed it), delay, release anyway or just pray for a solution and basicly administer the whole thing. If it lacks
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They'd just use linux (their own distro) everyday
No centos? (Score:2)
Centos is arguably the biggest used "upstream distro" out there... and it's not even listed!!
What gives?
Bah!
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CentOS / RH is a server distro. For the most part it is not intended for desktop surfing, or at least it is a really really low priority. It is built for long term stability, and also not breaking things with bleeding edge stuff. Server distros by nature are designed and maintained to grow long in the tooth so that hardware compatibility can be maintained. Server hardware is more expensive, thus why clients of companies like RH want to stretch the most life they can. Basically they are out of date by desi
gentoo (Score:4, Informative)
I think labeling gentoo at 75% obsolete is rather crazy. gentoo gives you the choice between the stable, and the latest and greatest, and they can be mixed too. I got the newest kernel just days after it was released, no problem at all.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Stable does not mean "obsolete" (Score:2)
Python representation is misguided. (Score:2)