software ugrade versions

[Justin Dugger]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 9:00 PM, Mike Luntz <laptop at mltserv.com> wrote:
> I am a relatively inexperienced user of Ubuntu and have noticed that
> even though new versions of applications are available from developers
> as source code, the package versions seem to lag significantly. Do
> application packages remain at the version that existed when the
> specific version of Ubuntu was released or do the MOTU maintainers
> update application versions as time and resources permit?

First, see this document: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackports

Versions may be backported if you have time or inclination to follow a
process. New versions can be placed in -backports, but it has to be in
development branch (Lucid) first, for both technical and social
reasons.

> The specific package I have in mind is Avogadro, for which version 1.0
> was just released. The version available on Jaunty is 0.8 and on Karmic
> is 0.9.7. I have considered compiling the source for version 1.0. But
> compiling version 1.0 depends on a number of other applications which
> are not available as packages and would, themselves, need to be compiled
> from source. Although I have installed a few applications from the
> source in the past, doing this for Avogadro seems too daunting a task.

Two commands you may very much appreciate are:

* apt-get source avogadro
and
* apt-get build-dep avogadro

These will get you the existing source, including debian/ubuntu
specific patches, and install the build dependencies. That may give
you the tools you need to build 1.0. If you get it to work, consider
reporting this to MOTU or the Debian maintainers.

> So I am wondering whether there will ever be a version update to
> Avogadro on either Jaunty or Karmic.

It looks like right now the only attention this package gets in Ubuntu
is fixing build failures.  Which is fine; you should get in contact
with Debian and see if they're working on it. If they are, it could be
possible to get it sync/merged from Debian unstable to Lucid, test it,
then backport to Karmic.  This may take some time, but it's an
unavoidable consequence; 1.0.0 released little over a week ago.

Justin Dugger