> I used Ubuntu 10.04 (the last LTS release) until this Sunday when I upgraded. And I wanted Mono, but Ubuntu Lucid (a less than 2 years old version) comes with

> I used Ubuntu 10.04 (the last LTS release) until this Sunday when I upgraded. And I wanted Mono, but Ubuntu Lucid (a less than 2 years old version) comes with Mono 2.4. And seriously, tons of improvements have been made between 2.4 and 2.10. For OS X you just go to mono-project.org and download / install the latest package. That's it. No distribution upgrade necessary. Mono is a special case, because quite a lot of apps which Ubuntu requires to work depend on it. If you swap out the system Mono, many bets are off. However, the usual way to handle this situation is a project-specific repository. If the upstream supplies an apt repository, or pushes to a backports repo like badgerports, then you can install just the version you want without upgrading the rest of the system. > For Ruby the development in Ruby-land is so fast that trying to bundle the latest JRuby or Rubinius would be a losing battle. And you also need packages installed only for the current user, if only because devs constantly experiment with beta-quality libraries and major versions have a habit of breaking backwards compatibility. That's precisely what RVM is for. > How are you going to solve that with DEBs or RPMs? You're not, and shouldn't try. > And you could say that Linux distributions shouldn't have versions and just upgrade stuff as soon as they are available. Well, as someone who lived for several months with Debian Sid, I can tell you that's not such a good idea. Looking in from the outside, it seems to work for Arch.