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That's not so simple. A distro is a fine-tuned collections of packages which work more or less well together. Debian, for instance, comes in stable/testing/unst
by mercurial 12y ago
That's not so simple. A distro is a fine-tuned collections of packages which work more or less well together. Debian, for instance, comes in stable/testing/unstable/experimental flavours, depending on how daring you are. But even this isn't a universal solution. If you are deploying for instance a web application, you will want to deploy a locked down number of dependencies as well, regardless of what is present on the target system. And you may need deploy multiple applications side by side. Few system package managers have an answer to this.
- DennisP 12y agoSo developers end up installing later versions manually. And in many cases it's no big deal. If the distro has Julia 0.2.1 and Emacs 23, I can upgrade to Julia 0.3 and Emacs 24 and it's not likely to damage anything. It'd just be nice if I could do it with the package manager instead. But just because I'm doing that doesn't necessarily mean I want, say, the latest unstable version of the window manager.
- mercurial 12y agoDebian will let you do that. You can run, say, your machine on testing but get the latest Firefox from experimental if you want. This may, however, upgrade other dependencies on your system, but it's pretty much unavoidable.