At the moment, the Racket package in the current stable release of Debian is using 6.1. That is an 8 month old package. Even unstable is only on on 6.3, which

At the moment, the Racket package in the current stable release of Debian is using 6.1. That is an 8 month old package. Even unstable is only on on 6.3, which itself is almost 6 months old. The last time I used Debian was at most a year ago, and at that time the stable package for Racket was still 5.3, which came out in 2013. And this same pattern repeated itself so often where programming tools were concerned that I eventually just gave up on using apt-get for developing and would wind up manually installing most languages, and then sometimes having to fight with conflicts because some package or other had already installed an out-of-date version, so now I either had to overwrite the package-installed version and risk breaking something, or just run it locally from some directory in /home. Contrast to Windows or OS X, where all I have to do to run Racket is go to the website, download the latest version, and possibly run an automated installer. On OS X, I just have to drag one icon onto another icon, and if the app's been set up right this even handles my command-line paths for me. Seriously, this is 2016. We have the internet now. We do not need to load every piece of software one would ever need onto a CD anymore like it's 1994 and the only reliable source of Linux software is Walnut Creek CD-ROMs. It is a perfectly reasonable expected use case that someone desiring a piece of software should be able to just go and download the most recent version, install it, and should need arise, uninstall it just as cleanly. Nowhere else is that process as broken as it is on Linux, especially under Debian's hopelessly slow update process.