If this is a response to my post, I’m rather confused. I didn’t state any preferences, nor did I comment on yours. What I tried to do was acknowledge your three specific complaints, briefly suggest why things have ended up working the way they currently do (to the best of my understanding as a fellow user), and share some ideas for how the noob experience could be improved in response to each of them. I apologize if any of it came across as dismissive of your workflow or preferences. Your concerns are valid and my intention was only think about the best way of addressing them.
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There isn’t a v0.9 of Julia, is that referring to something else?
Minor versions are not a tenths digit (the overall version number is not a decimal) and can have many digits.
I believe this wasn’t about environments resolving compatible package versions, but changes in minor revisions of base Julia that a package assumed would not happen. That would explain why it’s so rare because people avoid that kind of assumption. Pkg can’t catch such incompatibilities, and juliaup does not help or hurt the issue. If one prefers to wait for the ecosystem to catch and iron out a few kinks before updating base Julia, juliaup does not automatically update it, and one can add any versions they trust and make their go-to version the default for the julia command without specifying versions.
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They key reason for juliaup is to make upgrading and parallel installs easy.
Outside some very special use cases, it makes sense to keep up with the stable releases or at least the LTS, as each new version brings a lot of benefits and performance improvements (and of course, potential bugs and regressions, but hopefully those are fixed quickly). juliaup makes this extremely easy, as you can just have julia point to the version you make default — you can change everything with a single control.
Similarly, users may find that they need an earlier version, or if they stick to LTS they want to test the latest release, etc. juliaup makes it trivially easy.
Last, but not least: you can also install nightly, beta, rc, and individual PRs. Yes, you read that right! You can do juliaup add prXXX and it will pull that image if available. This is like magic.
I am not sure what you mean by “deny” in this context. You can just write and release it. That’s how juliaup started. You don’t need approval from anyone.
What is easy for Windows users can have different connotations for different folks.
I started with DOS and have some Unix/Linux experience so have no trouble with terminals. On Windows, I normally launch a program by using the Start key and typing the first few letters of the program I want. Thus the default no thinking way for me to launch Julia is Start ju Enter. The ju will auto fill to julia.
This is not ideal, because I am not in the folder I want to be and navigating to that folder is much easier before I launch Julia. So a better way is to navigate to the folder and launch powershell by typing powershell in the address bar of file explorer. Then launch Julia from powershell.
I just experimented and found I can also launch julia by typing its command into the address bar with all the options, as follows: julia +lts -t4 --project=.
I am sure many casual windows users are not aware of these options and some documentation of this will make the nooby experience much better.
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I understand the various benefits for somewhat advanced scenarios for Juliaup. I take nothing away from that for anyone who appreciates and takes advantage of those benefits. I am in no way encouraging anyone from changing their preference. I was, perhaps futilely, suggesting that there could be other preferences where Juliaup doesn’t provide similar benefits in the hopes that I would not be discouraged from using the nice installers that are consistently provided. I was also, perhaps futilely, hoping that there wouldn’t be a pile on effort to change my preferences.
I shall forebear from ever posting an opinion and use this great resource for help with specific questions.
All done.
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I want to lend support for your arguments presented in this thread. I also think that the default installation option presented to a generic Windows user when clicking Install
or Download on julialang.org should be the standalone graphical installer, that is in fact available from the ‘manual’’ download page on the site. The reason is that I would bet that the majority user on Windows is not development oriented (as evidence, see multiple threads here on Discourse about the lack of such users) and the approach of juliaup (which I love for development on macOS) is not typical of such users’ way of thinking about installation.
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The recommended option on Windows is to find Julia in the Microsoft Store and click install: Julia - Free download and install on Windows | Microsoft Store. It does use juliaup under the hood, but I don’t think using the Microsoft Store is a particularly development-oriented approach or would be alien to Windows majority users.
That said, the current installation instructions probably center the command-line interface to the msstore too much. It might be better if it instead stated clearly that you can just search, point, and click in the store as for any other app, or you can click this link to go directly to Julia in the store (I assume the link opens in the store and not the browser when you’re on Windows). The command line version could be an advanced option, a little further down the page, separated from the above by a subheading to make it clear that it’s an alternative, not a necessary second step.
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