Hello all. It doesn’t look like the debian/ubuntu PPA for Julia is getting updated anymore, as it’s been a few days since 0.5.1 and it still doesn’t appear there:
It would be really unfortunate if support for this disappeared, it’s just so convenient. As far as I know, the only other option on the Debian branches right now is to build from source.
Does anyone know anything about this?
Edit: Sorry, there are generic Linux binaries available here. Still, it would be really nice to have the package manager working.
It never really was maintained. If you search around the old julia-users mailing list, you’ll find tons of threads of it being way behind the times. Because of this, every mention of it has been removed from the julialang.org website, and it’s recommended that you use the generic binaries. If you want it maintained, then you might have to step up and do it .
Hm… perhaps I’ll look into that a bit. It would certainly be gratifying to make that contribution.
I’m using the pre-compiled binaries at the moment, and they are pretty painless to set up (although there really should be documentation on both the binary downloads page and on the Julia github README that tell you to set JULIA_HOME=/opt/julia/bin (or whatever your path is)).
My main concern at the moment is not whether the functionality of the PPA is really needed, but whether not having an actively maintained PPA discourages new users from trying Julia. It might be just me, but things that are not accessible through PPA’s or the main aptitude repository just seem “more alpha” somehow. Obviously Julia is still in development, but it is certainly way easier to work with than not having a PPA might imply to some.
FWIW, releases end up in major distributions, with some lag. The lag is not necessarily worse than for other software (Ubuntu is currently at 0.4.7, so is Debian testing and unstable), it’s just that with the rapid release cycle of Julia, packaged versions become obsolete very quickly. The situation is comparable to (and not necessarily worse than) other rapidly moving software, for which you have to get the binaries or compile.
Distribution policies also make it nearly impossible to get the specific versions and configurations of our dependencies that we need. Julia is difficult to package correctly. Issues like the fact that Debian’s libgit2 package can’t download packages over https make this worse.
If you really value using a package manager to install Julia, the best thing you could do is help maintain a repackaging of our generic binaries in each distro’s specific format. Anything built in too different of a configuration that results in problems that the generic binaries don’t have isn’t going to be supported though.
I it is important to have ppa. @staticfloat I can help you with the builds, did you have any script to build the packages? Can you show me how do you do it?
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