Julia v1.6.0-beta1 is now available

Announcements
1

The Julia developers are pleased to announce that Julia v1.6.0 is now in beta, and binaries for the first beta version, 1.6.0-beta1, are available now. You can get them at Download Julia in the “upcoming release” section for macOS, FreeBSD (x86-64), Windows (32-, 64-bit), glibc Linux (i686, x86-64, AArch64, and—for the first time in years—PowerPC), and musl Linux (x86-64). Check out the NEWS file to see what will be new in 1.6.0.

As a beta version, this should not be considered production-ready. Rather, it’s intended to give users, especially package developers, a chance to try our their code with 1.6.0 prior to a full release. Note that 1.6 on Travis, AppVeyor, Cirrus, and GitHub Actions now refers to 1.6.0-beta1.

Let us know in the issue tracker if you run into any issues. Please note that any bugs you may encounter should be posted there rather than being discussed in this thread to ensure visibility to the developers.

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Very excited about this! Unfortunately in GitHub Actions I’m getting an error:

Run julia-actions/setup-julia@v1
Error: Could not find a Julia version that matches 1.6

I think something similar happened on Travis a while ago, and I believe it just took a little while before it became available (I waited an hour or something, re-ran CI, and it worked).

Wasn’t sure if this should be posted as a Julia issue since it is not an error/bug in the language itself.

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Is 1.6 going to be the next LTS?

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Not officially confirmed, but probably. Supporting 1.0 for package devs is onerous enough at this point that most aren’t. Furthermore, 1.6 is an incredibly good release. It’s full of quality of life improvements, and is noticeably faster than previous releases for time to first plot.

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Whether a version is LTS or not is decided by the core developers after the version has been released, to see whether things are working as expected.

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Can you post it as an issue here: Issues · julia-actions/setup-julia · GitHub

cc: @SaschaMann

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Yes will do that shortly. Thanks!

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Same here.

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https://github.com/julia-actions/setup-julia/issues/66

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Crossposting from GH: Actions are explicitely versioned, unlike the default scripts for e.g. Travis, and there are security reasons why one would want to pin the version of the action to a specific commit. To avoid having to update the action/action version everytime a new Julia version comes out, setup-julia downloads the list of available versions from https://julialang-s3.julialang.org/bin/versions.json. This file is currently rebuilt only about every 24 hours, so it takes some time after the release is first tagged on GitHub for the version to be available via 1.6. Since the official announcement of a new Julia version often also takes some time after the tag on GH has been created, this isn’t always noticable.

There are some changes to the deployment of that json file to speed it up but they haven’t been implemented yet. One issue is that the script that generates that file currently takes ~30 min to run, so we can’t set it to run every hour as a quick workaround.

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Passing along a message from @SaschaMann

I just realised it may not actually work as 1.6. I believe the syntax for pre-releases is ^1.6.0-0

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I am on ubuntu Gnu/linux. Installing through snap install on 1.0.4 version. Please make them available with latest version, Thank you :slight_smile:

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tell Ubuntu maintainers that, in general, for normal usage, binary from the website is a better choice

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Thanks. In ubuntu it is fine but in distros like Debian It is unethical to install binaries directly. It would be great if julia would be available to apt too with latest version.

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Why would that be unethical? Even if you want to be strict about only running free software, Julia is MIT-licensed, regardless of how you install it.

The fact of the matter is that Julia carries around quite a few patches for third-party libraries, which makes it really hard to package as part of any Linux distributions. That’s not to say it’s impossible to have a recent Julia version in the Debian repositories, if someone put in the work, but it is not currently a priority. I never encountered any problems with just using the prebuilt binaries on Linux, you can even build Julia yourself quite easily.

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You must be misunderstanding something. Debian advises against make install, like most Linux distros (incl Ubuntu & derivatives) that use a package manager.

But since the Julia binary is perfectly happy wherever you extract or compile it, this is not a practical concern for Julia users.

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the julia:1.6.0-beta1 docker image is ready !!! :julia: :whale:

you can test with

docker pull julia:1.6.0-beta1
docker run -it --rm  julia:1.6.0-beta1

Available OS/ARCH

linux/amd64   144.84 MB     <-- Debian Buster based edition !!! 
linux/386     143.42 MB
windows/amd64   5.51 GB
windows/amd64   2.36 GB
linux/ppc64le 134.56 MB

Example

❯ docker run -it --rm  julia:1.6.0-beta1  
               _
   _       _ _(_)_     |  Documentation: https://docs.julialang.org
  (_)     | (_) (_)    |
   _ _   _| |_  __ _   |  Type "?" for help, "]?" for Pkg help.
  | | | | | | |/ _` |  |
  | | |_| | | | (_| |  |  Version 1.6.0-beta1 (2021-01-08)
 _/ |\__'_|_|_|\__'_|  |  Official https://julialang.org/ release
|__/                   |

julia> versioninfo()
Julia Version 1.6.0-beta1
Commit b84990e1ac (2021-01-08 12:42 UTC)
Platform Info:
  OS: Linux (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
  CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU @ 2.20GHz
  WORD_SIZE: 64
  LIBM: libopenlibm
  LLVM: libLLVM-11.0.0 (ORCJIT, broadwell)
Environment:
  JULIA_PATH = /usr/local/julia
  JULIA_GPG = 3673DF529D9049477F76B37566E3C7DC03D6E495
  JULIA_VERSION = 1.6.0-beta1
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19

Tried

version:
          - '1.5'
          - '^1.6.0.0'
          - 'nightly'

and still got the error

Error: Could not find a Julia version that matches ^1.6.0.0

1.5 and nightly did fine.

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@SaschaMann Do you know what the syntax is for getting the 1.6 beta on GHA?

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