Besides the automatic updates and the ability to easily run old versions in projects—two extremely good and compelling reasons—here are four other reasons for juliaup to have become the standard, recommended way to install Julia.
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People want to do
apt-get install juliaorbrew install juliaand use their distro package manager to install Julia. Unfortunately, distros seem mostly incapable of packaging Julia in a way that isn’t deeply broken. There’s a few notable exceptions, but this is pretty broadly true. Packaging juliaup (and maybe even calling the package “julia”) is very straightforward, however, and allows the distro to package something small and easy, which then installs and manages official Julia binaries correctly. End-users get the installation experience they want and still get non-broken Julia. This need to be done on various distros, but having juliaup as the standard way to install is a prerequisite. -
In the near future, if you activate a project and start Julia via juliaup, it will use the julia version indicated in the manifest automatically, which means that the whole bit about using old Julia versions in old projects to ensure they keep working exactly as they did before will be even more powerful and convenient—and will also become something that non-power users get automatically without having to do anything fancy. But this only works if they are using juliaup.
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Every alternative way of installing Julia has enormous development cost. It takes a huge amount of effort and time to develop, maintain, and test an installation system. So much effort. If you have not done this for software that is used and installed by hundreds of thousands of people on all different snowflakes of systems around the world, it’s hard to convey just how difficult it is to make it work smoothly most of the time. We do not want to double this effort. Or triple it. We want to focus on one standard way of installing that is really good and make it work really well for everyone everywhere.
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Every alternative way of installing Julia also has enormous user experience cost. Aside from higher development cost making each individual way of installing Julia less good, merely having more options makes things more confusing for users. “Yikes, there are three different ways to install Julia on my platform! Which one do I do? This tutorial tells me one thing but this blog post does another one. Eh, never mind…”
I do think we could have more native ways of installing juliaup: a Wizard on Windows, App Store on MacOS. And native GUIs to interact with juliaup are also a good idea. But having it be the standard way to install and manage Julia versions is a necessary prelude to that happening.