Ubuntu Repositories

[Graham Todd]

On Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:06:27 -0400
Michael Haney <thezorch at gmail.com> uttered these words:

> I'm wondering, why are the Ubuntu repositories so far behind version
> wise? What I mean is, I wanted to update to the latest VLC, but the
> version on the repos was really old.

This usually happens when a library or some such that the application
originally used has not been updated and thoroughly tested, and until it
is using the new version of the library in the new version of the
software may break the system.

Or that somebody given the job of testing the library to death hasn't
finished yet.....

> I had to add a PPA to my 3rd Party Software Sources just to get the
> latest version.  That version runs really well.

If you can do that, it means only that running VLC on **your** system
doesn't cause a problem, but it might do so on another system, so the
people who get the distribution together have to make sure its tested
thoroughly.  And that takes man hours...

> I mean, even the version of Firefox in the repos is several versions
> behind.

But not necessarily with any less functionality.  It might be that
Firefox is preparing for a future upgrade that is not yet with us.
And if by putting it in the repos it breaks something along the way
now, we'd be better off waiting a couple of months or more....

There are two schools of thought on this: one I shall call "the Debian
Way", and the other "the Ubuntu Way", though neither of those
descriptions is entirely accurate.  The Debian Way says that frequency
of software release is not the prime concern, but that testing is until
you have a server ready stable distribution on a wide range of
architectures.  The Ubuntu Way states that frequency of releases is
most important, and if we don't get around to testing everything, then
what's good enough for an average desktop on the x86 platform should be
good enough for the next release even if it doesn't contain all of the
"latest and greatest" versions of apps.

As I said this illustration is not totally accurate, and it avoids the
fact that Debian had a really terrible installer, but I believe these
two characterisations show the nature of the fork in the Debian project
and that regularity of releases is important to a lot of end users, and
not just stability (although too much instability is what the testing
period hopes to avoid).

-- 
Graham Todd
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