I highly doubt it is related to the package server. As mentioned above, Windows + Julia 1.6 and early this was a common issue. The behavior should be changed in 1.7, so I’d suggest the first thing you try is install 1.7.0-rc3 and add some packages and watch how fast it is.
I agree, 1.7 is overwhelmingly superior to 1.6. LTS should have been set for 1.7, IMO.
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99.9% of people should use the latest stable version of Julia, not LTS. If you’re regularly updating packages you definitely aren’t in the hyper-risk-averse category of user who should actually be using LTS.
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Frankly the number of people using LTS when they shouldn’t be makes me really wonder if we shouldn’t just do away with the whole LTS concept entirely. People with really conservative needs can just continue to use whatever old version they happen to be using.
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Having LTS makes for more work for package maintainers: I for instance have to maintain some packages to be compatible with anything from 1.6 up because people want to use them with 1.6, and I myself want to use the latest versions of packages.
There could be a “security patches only” level of support for selected versions.
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The whole LTS stuff really provides zero benefit in the context where I work (academic research), as far as I can tell.
On the other hand, I can easily imagine a scenario where say an organization wants to run some application that is written in Julia in production, and they do not want to update that to new versions of Julia every few months, but at the same time require peace of mind to get security patches. Isn’t that the scenario that LTS is meant for, essentially?
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Thats exactly it. Suppose you have a public web service, you want it to run for several years between updates but you don’t want it vulnerable to security flaws. That’s essentially the ONLY people who should use LTS.
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