This was an old discussion (back to 2013). Julia would not have been accepted in the official openSUSE repos if everything was bundled. In the beginning, even LLVM was not bundled, but this caused some weird bugs and I could relaxed this.
There are many problems when you bundle libraries regarding security. openSUSE Leap, which follows SLE, must be every stable and secure. Hence, this is very unlikely to change. Leap 15.1 will have Julia 1.0 and all other point releases. Tumbleweed will always have the latest version.
This is a major concern of mine, as I work at an HPC center and have been trying to increase adoption of Julia
One of our policies is that all scientific software should be built from source unless there is a good reason not to (“it’s hard to build” is not usually considered a good reason).
As far as I know Arpack still doesn’t work with the arch linux julia package.
See https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/59741
This is pretty important for a language designed for scientific computing I think and in consequence I can only use the binaries provided by the official julia website.
