Is Julia gone under next Debian versions?

New to Julia
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Hello there!
I am relatively new to Julia and I have started to use it for my research activities.

Probably I am wrong, but I have seen that Julia seems to be no longer available under Debian. On Debian Tracker julia - Debian Package Tracker I have noticed that “the package is going to disappear unless someone takes it over and reintroduces it”. Indeed, Julia seems to be not present in the Debian repository for forthcoming releases (e.g., Bookworm). Could someone tells me what is going to happen?

Antonio

2

Hi! welcome to discourse.

The julia GitHub README states:

Note: Although some system package managers provide Julia, such installations are neither maintained nor endorsed by the Julia project. They may be outdated, broken and/or unmaintained. We recommend you use the official Julia binaries instead.

The general recommendation is to download from the website instead of depending on OS repos.

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Oh, that’s fine. Thank you!

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Also check out GitHub - JuliaLang/juliaup: Julia installer and version multiplexer. We are starting a more widespread test phase this week, and then it will become the default recommended way to install Julia.

My hope is that at that point we can also put it back into things like Debian as the official Julia distribution.

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Downloading a .dmg file on a MAC seems much easier.

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I just installed juliaup with brew, and then two julia versions to this Mac. This almost could not be simpler!

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While for the Julia user/programmer indeed there is little burder in installing from official site than from official deb repos, we still have the problem that if Julia applications/scripts want to be shipped in Linux distros, they will need a suported OS package…

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yes users would love another “I ran sudo pip and it broke my system python help” situation

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Hopefully not.

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I don’t think you’re allowed to have build-time dependencies which aren’t packaged for most distros.

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Until now there are hardly any generic Julia apps anyway… Mainly Julia packages for people who write their own apps…

The question is, shall this stay as it is or change?

If we want Julia apps on Linux we probably need a supported Julia package at least for Debian…

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Julia is supported with snap OS package, in Ubuntu (the most popular Linux) and more Linux, such as Debian (though snap not there preinstalled I think). It supports latest 1.8.2 and LTS. snap is preinstalled on Ubuntu, can be installed on Debian, though not as easily on Linux Mint, which uses flatpak, since it’s prevented:

To prevent repository packages from triggering the installation of Snap,
this file forbids snapd from being installed by APT.

snap Julia works for me (even on Mint), and is no longer 32-bit, was a problem before, with these instructions:
https://snapcraft.io/docs/installing-snap-on-linux-mint

flatpak also works on Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, RedHat etc. but I didn’t look into if there’s a julia flatpak.

juliaup, should be the future on Linux, in snap and/or flatpak form (maybe apt and rpm too?). And I would think preinstalled. Julia doesn’t need its own package, nor to be preinstalled.