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Archlinux is far from being up to date though e.g openjdk is stuck with release from last year (15 instead of 16) It's a quite miserable experience in 2021 to n

Archlinux is far from being up to date though e.g openjdk is stuck with release from last year (15 instead of 16) It's a quite miserable experience in 2021 to not have a single distro that is universally up to date with software development. Windows has this since day 1 if we talk about auto updating software and the windows store apps, being owned by the app makers instead of by a poor middleman (the distro village) are by design up to date.

ticviking 5y ago
So pay for open source. Or volunteer. As engineers we have no one but ourselves to blame for this one
jpetso 5y ago
With packaging technologies such as Flatpak and Snap, app makers now have the option to distribute a bundled-everything version of their software to Linux users. This has drawbacks too though, in that it's now up to app makers to take care of keeping supporting libraries up to date and secure. That's not necessarily their top priority though, which is a risk for the end user. Also, unnecessary duplication of libraries increasing memory use, when the distro is able to share most of them. Plus the poor middleman has an incentive to set user-friendly, privacy-preserving defaults that I wouldn't trust as much when the package is provided by a commercial company with different incentives. It's great to have the option, but overall I would still prefer to use distro packages except in the rare special case.
vngzs 5y ago
Yeah, sorry, the openjdk situation sucks. It's an "extra" package, which means the maintainer is a community member rather than being part of the Arch core group. The nice thing about Arch packages, though, is that they're basically just bash scripts. And if all you need is a simple version bump, it's usually quite easy: download the package tarball from [0] and change [1] to the version you want, then do a `makepkg -s` in the directory of the package. It will build the package in a (usually reproducible) chroot. If it builds without errors, then you'll end up with a tarball that you can `pacman -U ${pkg}.tar.zst` to install the produced files. If you need help, makepkg documentation on the wiki[2] is pretty great. And don't forget to send a patch to arch-dev-public[3] and CC the maintainer. At the very least, it'll kick off a discussion that will get the package updated. Rolling your own packages is easy in contrast to, say, Red Hat - where compiling an RPM is easy if you've done it a bunch, but really difficult to get bootstrapped on. [0]: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/jdk-openjdk/ https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/jdk-openjdk/ [1]: https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages/java-openjdk/trunk/PKGBUILD#L8 https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages... [2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Makepkg https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Makepkg [3]: https://lists.archlinux.org/listinfo/arch-dev-public https://lists.archlinux.org/listinfo/arch-dev-public
- iruoy 5y ago
  There've been questions about this on the mailing lists recently https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2021-May/048892.html https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2021-May/... https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2021-May/048893.html https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2021-May/...
- bscphil 5y ago
  > Yeah, sorry, the openjdk situation sucks. It's an "extra" package, which means the maintainer is a community member rather than being part of the Arch core group. This is incorrect. Packages in both core and extra are maintained by the core Arch developers. You're probably thinking of the community repository, which is maintained by a group called Trusted Users. These are still heavily vetted, it's not just anyone from the community. Or maybe you're thinking of the AUR, which is a completely untrusted repository of build scripts, which anyone can submit to. In this case, the issue is that anthraxx, one of the Arch developers [1], has not updated many of their packages in some time. I don't know if a reason is known, but you might find something in the mailing list links someone else has posted. [1] https://archlinux.org/people/developers/ https://archlinux.org/people/developers/
scns 5y ago
OpenSuse Tumbleweed / GeckoLinux Rolling have openjdk16. They have an extensive battery of automatic tests to prevent breakage and btrfs to rollback in case something should happen.

ticviking 5y ago

So pay for open source. Or volunteer. As engineers we have no one but ourselves to blame for this one

jpetso 5y ago

With packaging technologies such as Flatpak and Snap, app makers now have the option to distribute a bundled-everything version of their software to Linux users. This has drawbacks too though, in that it's now up to app makers to take care of keeping supporting libraries up to date and secure. That's not necessarily their top priority though, which is a risk for the end user. Also, unnecessary duplication of libraries increasing memory use, when the distro is able to share most of them. Plus the poor middleman has an incentive to set user-friendly, privacy-preserving defaults that I wouldn't trust as much when the package is provided by a commercial company with different incentives. It's great to have the option, but overall I would still prefer to use distro packages except in the rare special case.

vngzs 5y ago

Yeah, sorry, the openjdk situation sucks. It's an "extra" package, which means the maintainer is a community member rather than being part of the Arch core group. The nice thing about Arch packages, though, is that they're basically just bash scripts. And if all you need is a simple version bump, it's usually quite easy: download the package tarball from [0] and change [1] to the version you want, then do a `makepkg -s` in the directory of the package. It will build the package in a (usually reproducible) chroot. If it builds without errors, then you'll end up with a tarball that you can `pacman -U ${pkg}.tar.zst` to install the produced files. If you need help, makepkg documentation on the wiki[2] is pretty great. And don't forget to send a patch to arch-dev-public[3] and CC the maintainer. At the very least, it'll kick off a discussion that will get the package updated. Rolling your own packages is easy in contrast to, say, Red Hat - where compiling an RPM is easy if you've done it a bunch, but really difficult to get bootstrapped on. [0]: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/jdk-openjdk/ https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/jdk-openjdk/ [1]: https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages/java-openjdk/trunk/PKGBUILD#L8 https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages... [2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Makepkg https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Makepkg [3]: https://lists.archlinux.org/listinfo/arch-dev-public https://lists.archlinux.org/listinfo/arch-dev-public

iruoy 5y ago
There've been questions about this on the mailing lists recently https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2021-May/048892.html https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2021-May/... https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2021-May/048893.html https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2021-May/...
bscphil 5y ago
> Yeah, sorry, the openjdk situation sucks. It's an "extra" package, which means the maintainer is a community member rather than being part of the Arch core group. This is incorrect. Packages in both core and extra are maintained by the core Arch developers. You're probably thinking of the community repository, which is maintained by a group called Trusted Users. These are still heavily vetted, it's not just anyone from the community. Or maybe you're thinking of the AUR, which is a completely untrusted repository of build scripts, which anyone can submit to. In this case, the issue is that anthraxx, one of the Arch developers [1], has not updated many of their packages in some time. I don't know if a reason is known, but you might find something in the mailing list links someone else has posted. [1] https://archlinux.org/people/developers/ https://archlinux.org/people/developers/

scns 5y ago

OpenSuse Tumbleweed / GeckoLinux Rolling have openjdk16. They have an extensive battery of automatic tests to prevent breakage and btrfs to rollback in case something should happen.